#the website I use sometimes has its episodes a little out of order

[astronomical-bagel]

Oh my god they are so incredibly nerdy

#Not the informational words floating in the sky 😫 #astro liveblogs #2012 s2 ep15 #possibly #the website I use sometimes has its episodes a little out of order

[flightfoot]

I know fandom wank has always existed, but do you see an upswing in people being obsessed with character accountability and purity of character? I'm a fandom old and I could be wrong, but it seems to me that fandom in the last 5 - 8 years has been on this strong accountability/morality obsession.

Like there has been so much Alya hate popping up lately. I saw a thread on another sm site where they were ranting about how horrible she is for her pushiness in Reflekdoll and how she was not held accountable for it. Someone said that the writing for her is all over the place because she behaves as she does in Reflekdoll and then is a good friend sometimes.

My response to that is "Have you met PEOPLE?" People who have positive traits and negative traits and demonstrate them on a regular basis? Human beings with flaws?

The defenders feed into this purity of morality obsession too. When 'Targeted Character' is besmirched, the defender of that character will jump to say "No actually that character is not to blame. Blame this other character I like less instead!" or "Targeted Character did nothing wrong!"

Well, sometimes 'Targeted Character' was wrong. Alya is a bit pushy in Reflekdoll. She could have done some things differently.

So what?

Alya has also demonstrated bravery, determination, loyalty, intelligence and restraint. Flaws are often a dual side of a strength. Alya can be pushy because Alya is brave and initiating. But I guess all her strengths go out of the window when she displays a flaw. Especially if it's a flaw where no accountability was shown in episode.

But writers don't just write characters demonstrating flaws with the intent to show accountability later. Sometimes they write characters demonstrating their flaws to further the plot and/or show off the character's personality. There is nothing wrong with this, especially not for side characters. Not every minor problematic thing a character does needs to be addressed. Even Marinette and Adrien have shown their flaws in several episodes to further the plot or embellish them with no in episode accountability.

I just don't get what these people want. A super sanitized cardboard-scape where no one does anything problematic ever unless there is a pointed lesson to be learned? That sounds extremely boring and I'd hate to read these peoples' writing. They seem to want to suck the humanity out of characters and story. I get it's a kid show, but is it necessarily smart to teach kids that "good" people are never to show their flaws ever? That everytime they step one toe out of line, the waiting hand of justice will strike? Fandom discards much easier than they used to.

Yeah people tend to go WAY overboard. I dunno if this is a recent phenomenon? I didn't run into it in my older fandoms, namely Digimon and Kingdom Hearts (mostly Kingdom hearts), but that might have more to do with those specific fandoms than a trend over time (especially since Kingdom Hearts is a remarkably peaceful fandom, considering its size).

Funny thing about Alya in Reflekdoll, I actually wrote a fic several years back called Divergent Points - Reflekdoll specifically addressing her behavior in that episode in order to use it to develop her character, to explore her more and use it as a learning opportunity.

“Adrien? Marinette? Where are your Miraculous?”

They both looked slightly uncomfortable, patting their bags.

Ok. So they weren’t wearing them right now, but they were close by. This would be fine. It was only going to be for a little bit, less than an hour. Surely Hawkmoth wouldn’t attack during this tiny little window of time.

Right?

…Maybe she should call for back-up. You know, just in case.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alya just wanted to help Marinette with getting some good modeling photos for her website. Getting carried away with Adrienette shipping, accidentally neglecting one of her friends, and donning the FIRST Miraculous Marinette had attempted to give her had NOT been part of her plans.

Here's the thing: there are a lot of cases where I agree that a character (and this comes up for Alya in particular) demonstrated some kind of flaw.

What I do NOT agree with is the response to exhibiting that kind of flaw. I can agree that a character wasn't perfect and messed up in some way without making them a terrible person - like you said, human beings have flaws, and if everyone in the show was always perfect it'd be boring and the characters would feel less like people. Now I'd like some more development concerning some of the flaws, but callouts aren't required for every little thing, and something like "Alya was so caught up in trying to wingman for Marinette that she didn't realize how badly Juleka was taking the situation" is not something she deserves to be raked over the coals for.

A lot of times people jumping on the characters for not being perfect, for having some kind of flaw, for Miraculous, and for Alya ESPECIALLY, tends to go way overboard. If people were just saying that there are some traits she has that can cause difficulties and it'd be good if there was a storyline addressing them and having her grow past them, I'd be on board with that. Heck, I've WRITTEN that, as you can see above.

But taking a microscope to anything even minorly grating that she has done, while ignoring all the good she's done as well, just to bash and demonize her as a horrible person and try to justify writing her as some horrible human being, in order to justify then having her get some extreme comeuppance? On a regular basis for the past several years?

No. Just...no.

#ask #ml fandom salt #leave alya alone challenge

[gemsofgreece]

Γεια σου! I’m a Romanian History student specialising in International Relations and I am about to enter the last year of my Bachelor’s Degree, meaning I will have to write a thesis in order to obtain a diploma. I also happen to be learning Greek. I have been fascinated by the history of 20th century Greece for a while now and have written almost every essay we were assigned on topics surrounding it, thus I have picked “Greece’s foreign policy in the 20th century” as the topic for my thesis. As for any other scholarly work, I will be in need of primary sources and I was wondering if there are any Greek digitalised archives which may contain relevant documents regarding Greece’s foreign affairs and so on? Thank you so much!

Γεια! Bună! :)

I don't know if I can come up with sources for exactly what you ask in specific but here's some stuff I found.

I would first recommend the captain obvious / sly way: Go to the page of the History of Modern Greece in Wikipedia. The page is very detailed and long and it links you to even more detailed main articles about all the historical events one by one. And there are all the references you can search more and the citations you can use there. I linked the English page - but do study the Greek equivalent simultaneously. Sometimes the English one leans towards British / French "inherent innocence" in regards to its involvement in Greek matters. So both together, with their links to extra pages and all the references can provide a generous amount of information that will be pretty safe.

Old publications released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They cover several of the years 1878 - 1921. Half are in Greek and half are in French though. Here's the link.

Here you will find the pdf of the standard senior high school book on modern and modern Greek history.

This is a pdf of the Topics on Modern Greek History, the schoolbook of the senior year in high school for those who plan to study humanities and social sciences in particular.

The link I am giving you below includes online catalogs from Greek libraries (National Library, Academy of Athens and Gennadius Library). It also has links to open access databases on Modern Greek studies. It's catalogs though, research guides. Not access to the books themselves.

One that might be useful is the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. It's the scientific journal dealing with Greek history and culture exclusively after the Byzantine era.

I would recommend the podcast of historian Giorgos Mavrogordatos - Διορθωτικά Μαθήματα Ιστορίας (Corrective History Lessons). It's very serious work, based on his books as well which he mentions so you can search for them and buy them for more info or in order to cite them. You will find his podcast everywhere, Apple, Spotify, and pod.gr . It has around 67 episodes I believe, the first nine discuss other incidents in Europe and the world which could be similar to Greece's situation and then all the rest are about Greece - mostly the events of 1922 but stretching before and after that, and then some episodes about the Greek monarchy. Of course the problem is that it is, well, a podcast, therefore you need to be acquainted with listening to Greek rather than reading it.

A history website that has great quality and a lot of stuff is Η ΜΗΧΑΝΗ ΤΟΥ ΧΡΟΝΟΥ. It has also articles about world history and its own podcasts. It has a huge archive of articles on Greek history and particularly the modern one, and a lot of little known events, people's documentations and experiences of said historical events, which can give a touch of spice to your thesis. Check out its history menu in this screenshot:

See, it covers the 20th century exhaustively. Of course, it's a website, so what you can do is that once you read something useful in this website, you then make a targeted search about it on the Internet to find the scientific sources and citations because they don't do it themselves often. But they are legit.

That's the best I could do. Inviting anyone knowing history professors' by name to give us links to their publications (cos I am bad with names and remembering sources and such) or if there is any digital archive database you know out there, help Anon out!!!

In the meantime, I still think the wikipedia can save a life when used carefully. And the podcast is good. In fact, if you search your pod app with Greek characters about "νεότερη Ελληνική ιστορία", it might give you several useful results.

BTW I was amazed to find out that we apparently do not have a Greek-based proper, modern, attractive, friendly to use website about Greek History (all of it), addressed to everyone interested and just being a good, extensive and easily accessible source of historiographical content. I have seen many other nations, even much smaller, having such and putting a lot of work in them (although to my recollection in some cases the contents are wild and not very scientific...). You'd expect Greece would have something similar (hopefully minus the unscientific part) about Greek history but nah. This is both sad and not surprising at all. I mean, η μηχανή του χρόνου is good but it's mostly Greek for Greeks. And other blogs that are very personal and subjective may lack in integrity. But an official modern state-supported website that could engage people from all over the world? Nah. I mean, the ministry itself suggests in the year of our Lord 2023 to use IE4 as a browser! Put THAT on your thesis Anon *laughs to hide the frustration*

#greece #greek history #history #modern greek history #resources #i mean...meh #i hope buna is correct btw #anon #ask #tw long post #tw long text #tw long #coals of greece

[dyst0p14-n]

I don't really know who I am yet.

Ever since I learnt to string together coherent sentences, I've always liked writing like these little introduction entries. Whether it be in a new notebook, online, or even in my stories, I love being able to talk about myself. I used to think I was egotistical, so I just kept these entries to myself, but I've grown to realise it's less of a "I love myself to bits" thing, and more of a "catching up with myself every once in a while" thing. I think it's important to check in on yourself every once in a while. You know, to keep yourself from totally losing your mind and ending up in a psych ward. I mean, I'll end up in a psych ward regardless. What I'm trying to get at is hi, welcome to my little online diary. Fair word of warning, I have a lot of issues and I've seen literal porn on this website, so I'm not exactly worried about my posts being taken down if I talk about actively cvtting myself (I'll like censor my words just to be safe). Trigger warning for every single trigger under the sun: svicide, self h4rm, eating "this order", mommy and daddy issues, substance abuse, just to name a fun few. Obviously, my whole life doesn't revolve around that stuff (it absolutely does, I'm just gaslighting myself), so it's not like all my entries will be suicide letter after suicide letter.. or something. I might post it in the future though, so look forward to that!

ANYWAY, hi. I'm Amelia (people also call me Jemma if they're feeling funky), I'm 16 as of the 31st of March, and I'll be treating this as my diary. Basically decided on making this on a whim, so I have no clue whether I'll be writing here every day, or just once in a blue moon, time will tell. Honestly, I made this account to commemorate me surviving this long. I never imagied I'd make it to 16, and yet here we are. I didn't plan on making it this far, and I really don't have any plans on what to do with myself. I'm kinda at a loss. Before, it's just been a countdown to the day my candle goes out. Now, I wake up confused. What am I doing here? What is there for me? Is there anything for me out there? Everyday is a question. A question to which the answer is unclear, but I can make an educated guess that it's either drugs, money or death. Maybe all of the above.

I guess theres a few things I like to do. I'll get into detail in a later entry if I feel like it. It's getting pretty late.

I draw sometimes. I used to only do digital art, but I lost my apple pencil and have been too embarrased to tell my mam, so i just switched to permenant pencil drawings. I actually prefer it. I used to hate it because I was really bad at anatomy and using a digital drawing program let me rearrange the limbs as I so pleased. I can't do that on paper, it forces me to practice and get better. And I'd like to think that I have. I understand muscle structure a lot better. Perspective, and all that jazz. I also bought a watercolour set recently, so I've been messing around with that. It's pretty fun!

I also write stories. A lot of them. I'm actually in the process of writing the pilot episode for one of my projects; It's called "All-in". Its about this snobby rich girl who is running an illegal underground gambling ring who meets this depressed traumatised orphan boy who's part of a gang that is trying to take down the mafia and is constantly on someone’s kill list, he accidentally drags her into his business after his brother is kidnapped and the mafia thinks shes affiliated with him and she is now on the kill list as well. He is under the impression that she doesn’t want anything to do with any of this, not knowing she has a criminal record of her own. It's a whole thing, I won't bore myself by explaining all the small details. This is my diary! It exists for my leisure and to let out everything on my mind! I'll leave the work to work hours.

Another major hobby of mine is volleyball. Officially, I'm a setter. In reality, I'm a bench warmer. I haven't been playing very long. Maybe a year and a half. So naturally, I suck at it. I still have a lot of fun with it. Maybe i shoud become a professional volleyball player if I don't end up killing myself?

What else is there about me.... I listen to a lot of rock and metal. All sorts of varients of the two. Really, I like all genres of music, these are just my personal favourites. I also listen to a ton of vocaloid. It's been a staple of my personality since 2016. If youve been here since before i repurposed this account (which, I doubt you did), then you'd have seen my entire page was FILLED with Hatsune Miku stuff. Big fan.

I watch a lot of anime. My favourites are FMA, Soul Eater and Assassination Classroom. I also have a manga collection that is worth over 450 quid. Some might say thats a waste, since I'm poor and could use that money to feed myself for a month, but food is temporary, wasted female lead potentional is forever.

I'm gonna gp to sleep now. I'll add on whatever I can think of when I'm back from school tomorrow.

...

School sucks dick.

-amelia

[americachavez]

did cas really tell dean to kneel before their new god? did that actually happen? i thought him beating the shit out of dean in that alley was the most unrestrainedly horny thing this show had ever done ACTUALLY you know what scratch that new question: top horny moments from the cw's supernatural (2005 - 2020)

getting this ask feels like my sins of the last week have been weighed against the Trials I Have Gone Through since the premier of supernatural on the wb in september of 2005 and I’m not sure if it is a punishment or reward

some notes before we begin:

the ep with dean’s male siren was like, conceptually horny but not actually that horny because the dude was uglie. I’m sorry to this man

all you sam girls out there. I respect you but I do not respect jared padalecki who is JUST tall and has zero sex appeal. but those eps where he’s like, drinking ruby’s blood and then eating her pussy are. you know. I’ll give you that

I am ONLY UP TO SEASON 10 so fair warning this is not comprehensive but the horniness does seem to drop off sharply after the mark of cain is no longer in play lol gotta love a good demon murder tattoo plot

this is easily the most insane thing I’ve ever done, including the destiel manifesto

S1 EP12: the scene where dean gets healed by the faith healer, on his knees with a hand in his hair and looking somewhere between religious ecstasy, brain death and an orgasm. starting this list off great

S1 EP22: azazel possessing john winchester. no I will not explain further if u know u know <3

S3 EP10: dean being taunted by a dream version of himself, this is where we first got the daddy’s blunt little instrument line. still burned in my hippocampus a good 13 years later thank yew

S4 EP1: dean crawling out of his own grave covered in grave dirt. hot. the HANDPRINT. HOT. also tangent but this reveal after the s3 finale was WILD back in 2008 I hollered in my dorm room after canvassing for obama. simpler times man

S4 EP 1: cas’ intro scene. the barn. the shadow wings. the hair??? getting stabbed in the chest by the man you just pulled out of hell. getting aaaallll up in that personal space. his little eyebrow. “you don’t think you deserve to be saved.” OUTRAGEOUSLY FLAMING

S4 EP02: “I dragged you out of hell I can throw you back in.” <<< this angel tops. mark dean down as scared and horny etc

S4 EP16: this ENTIRE EPISODE but specifically the part where dean tortures alastair as some kind of foreplay and then alastair kicks his ass. carved you into a new animal. jesus.

S4 EP16: wait I forgot about the part where cas also gets his ass kicked and looks all....hm. dazed and covered in blood while he’s on his knees and about to die. yeah.

S5 EP4: I mean this entire ep is unfairly horny considering everyone is dying of a zombie plague and hasn’t showered in like, 4 years but if I had to pick one hmmm. the dean/dean interrogation scene with the panty kink yeah I know it’s not original but hm. it happened. also misha collins just being able to convey that CAS IS A FLEXIBLE SLUT with a single roll of his shoulders. who SAYS this man can’t act!!!!!

S5 EP18: the ALLEY SCENE. DEAN DOESN’T FIGHT BACK. CAS HOLDS HIM UP OFF THE GROUND AND THEN THROWS HIM ACROSS THE ALLEY. WHY DID EVERYONE THINK CAS COULDN’T TOP. you all had brainworms.

S5 EP18: when cas locks dean in the panic room to stop him from saying yes to michael and “well cas not for nothing but the last person who looked at me like that I got laid” I hate this show. wait I think the blow me cas line is in this episode too what the fuck were they on here

S6 EP5: the scene where dean gets turned into a vampire. between the old dude who I think calls dean a pretty boy (??) and soulless sam....watching??? no ******* but there were just some absolutely foul energies in that scene and I still do not understand WHAT they were thinking

S6 EP20: cas doing a double smite on two demons by slamming them to the ground and then shoving another demon back in its vessel and then smiting him in the same motion. TOP. ENERGY.

S6 EP22: season 6 is possibly cas’ horniest season because he’s like, going through angel puberty after getting his first boner for dean, but the final cas eps are. whoof. cas eats a bunch of souls and proclaims himself to be a new god in order to handle said boner, and then the season ends with cas telling them to bow down and profess their love to him, their new lord, or he will destroy them. note: the way this is framed makes it look like cas is only staring at dean while he says this, even though sam and bobby are also there. the season ends with dramatic zooms on both cas and dean’s faces respectively. this made me actively regret ditching this show after s5 lol

S8 EP??: literally EVERY SINGLE PURGATORY FLASHBACK. cas dean and benny are all purgatory hot in the “pop 10 cranberry pills and risk the UTI” kind of way but also. dean being the hot girl bottom between two tops who hate each other. I really. whew. I need to go take a shower.

S8 EP17: if I get canceled for including the crypt scene on this list I blame you bud. but dean on his knees begging a brainwashed cas to stop killing him WAS sexy. how many times has dean been on his knees in this list wait there’s another one coming up next jsldjfsldkjf

S9 EP2: abaddon getting dean on his knees (YEAH) and pulling his hair and praising him for always coming when called HELLO???? the only thing that ruins this is dean says “I can’t tell if we’re gonna fight or make out” because this is the CW and they won’t let him say fuck

S9 EP6: ah. this entire episode is Emotionally Horny but the horny horny part is when they’re in the car and dean is telling cas to unbutton his shirt and. watches. I know this was on my destiel manifesto but I need it here too

S9 EP9: cas, covered in blood, slitting another angel’s throat and eating his grace after getting tortured. that shot alone made me understand why this website was so goddamn horny for misha collins for nearly a damn decade

S9 EP11: MARK OF CAIN BABEY. cain watching dean beat up a bunch of demons as an audition for taking on the mark, while crowley also is a fucking voyeur to the whole thing. cain is also a hot silver fox with daddy energies. I said what I said

S9 EP 16: dean getting the first blade. he’s chained to a pillar and being menaced by a foppish dandy who wants to add him to his “collection” (WOW). dean then kills him with the blade and whew. murder is sexy sometimes

S9 EP21: dean being pinned against a wall by abaddon’s power, then using the mark of cain to break her hold, calling the first blade to him psychically and then killing her. god the mark of cain is hot

S9 EP23: dean waking up with the demon eyes NUT

S10 EP2: demon dean beating up that dude with the boring backstory and kicking his ass. really was a go on baby I got your flower moment because I hated that dude and I love demon dean

S10 EP3: demon dean being chained up and taunting sam about how his brother is gone, then hunting sam through the bunker. demon dean in general was VERY fun for me, someone who loves trash

S10 EP9: dean going berserk and killing a bunch of pedophile rapists/child abusers. I’m sorry I know this show is trying to preach morality at me about monsters and unnecessary murder and humanity or whatever but we blew past that like 8 SEASONS AGO. also the mark of cain is sexy

S10 EP14: the rest of this list is really gonna be mark of cain stuff isn’t it look I’m here to have fun. cain and dean’s fight. cain continuously tossing his mane of hair back and taunting dean with the picture of what he’s going to become, who he’s going to kill. dean begging cain to tell him that he can stop, and then ultimately killing him. rip daddy.

S11 EP4: again I have not watched this however. every shot of this episode is PRESTIGE TELEVISION because driving a muscle car is sexy. and especially the shot of dean all beat to hell and begging his car to start and giving her a little kiss from his fingers to her dash. ugh. masculinity.

S12 EP10: the bearded salt-and-pepper daddy look returns, only it’s an angel this time and he’s wearing a vest and shirtsleeves and he swordfights with a hot redheaded lady in a suit and an eyepatch. this show is good sometimes!!! and oh fuck lol I just realized this is the same guy who played krissy’s hot hunter dad in s7 probably the first guy who’s hotter as an angel than a hunter. huh.

S12 EP 11: dean riding larry the mechanical bull to “broomstick cowboy.” I have no idea where this factors into the ep but I have seen. the youtube clip

S13 EP23: from what I can tell s13 is way more emotionally horny than boner horny, although dean burning cas’ body was sexy. but the horniest part was dean saying yes to michael and then michael taking over and saying “thanks for the suit.” we are going to ignore the silliest fight scene in existence as well as the final shot ending on a FREEZE FRAME like a goddamn tiktok

S14: not gonna pick a specific moment because I have not watched yet!!! but michael dean is hot. idk why michael is weirdly hot and I cannot stand any iteration of lucifer on this television programme. it should be the reverse but I’m forever an older sibling stan apparently. someone who is catholic could probably explain this better.

S15 EP13: genevieve padalecki and danneel ackles fight flirting as ruby and anael I CANNOT BELIEVE THEY HELD OUT ON THIS TILL THE LAST SEASON

I know I am missing things but this is already an absolutely incomprehensible screed. I know I’m missing shit from the latter seasons but give me time I’m pacing myself

#reply tag #spn tag #literally no one read this lol this is insane #Anonymous

[hyucksong]

nct dream as roommates

a/n: *romantically calls you bro* 

lee mark 

the roommate that walked in on you taking a shower on the first night you moved in and avoided you for a week afterward

he even went as far as browsing different apartments to live in because baby boy was too afraid to face you

sometimes wakes up before you and he always prepares your coffee or tea and sets it by your bed for you when you wake up…sometimes sits on the edge of your bed to watch you

asks you to do his laundry because he doesn’t know how to separate the colors

you’re fine with doing them because he tries his absolute bestest with everything else, and it’s so cute

the first time he did the laundry you were sick…and you got a whole new wardrobe of pink clothing the next day

always does the dishes and you do the laundry…he’ll clean the living room and kitchen if you clean the bathrooms…he’ll go grocery shopping…only if you go with him

asks you to do his hair when he meets up with his friends, and if you say no he says “okay” and then pouts until you agree

you really like photography but hiring models is expensive so you always ask mark to model for you

and he always agrees, blushing while doing so

make-up artists are expensive too, so you also get him dressed up and add whatever you want to his face

(once you did a fairy photoshoot and he had freckles and pink cheeks and your heart did the thing) 

this time you need him to sit still for hours because it's supposedly a big photoshoot with a few other photographers coming too, so there’s a lot of looks to get through 

you do the first look before you get to the photo site to save time

he thinks nothing of you curling his hair until he looks up at you and time slows as his heart stops…

because you smell like vanilla and your nose is scrunched in concentration…because your breathing is heavy as you run to the bathroom to get more things before you’re late…

because you’re biting your lip while looking at him, admiring your own work, proud of the way the make-up came out, but a little disheartened because it looked like you put a little too much blush (even though you only put a little) 

and mark thinks,,, oh no

fuck

huang renjun

your best friend since you were a child

you’re used to ‘living with him’ because you practically lived with him as a kid; you were always at his house spending the night or vice versa 

he wakes you up an hour after he gets up because ‘he needs his peaceful time’

claims that ‘you’re the worst person to live with’ but refuses to look for another apartment because ‘no one else can handle you but me’

(in reality, he knows that there will never be anyone else he’ss comfortable with as you) 

he wakes you up by throwing a pillow in your face and or flopping on your bed next to you and bouncing a few times

once got really scared because you weren’t waking up no matter what he did, and when he started to tear up you opened your eyes and pushed him off the bed 

you just didn’t want to be woken up that day and tried to ignore him, but apparently, you ignored him for too long because he genuinely freaking out on the inside

he’s watched ‘what’s eating gilbert grape’ okay he was SCARED

he didn’t talk to you for three days after that....only started to wake you up again because you made the effort to wake up before him and make him breakfast in bed with hot tea

he expected you to leave his room after you gave it to him, but you just looked at him for a minute before sitting on the bed next to him, getting under the covers with him 

he focused on the fact you were taking up all the space instead of the now-familiar thrum of his heartbreak against his ribcage

(he’s felt it for the past fewyears, he’s gotten used to drowning it out) 

“y/nnnnnnn what are you doingggggg”

“shut up i made the breakfast, can’t i at least sit next to my favorite boy?”

...he’s your favorite boy?...okaythatwasreallycutebuthe’llneveradmitit

“o...kay...”

blushes when you lay your head on his shoulder in bed, watching whatever he’s doing on his phone, because your cheek is warm against his shirt and its bleeding through onto his skin and weiowioegfhowieh

but also yells at you when you take a bite of his toast and bolt out of the room, giggling

“yAH y/N”

lee jeno

the roommate that was awkward for the first month because he didn’t really want to room with a girl because then he can’t spend saturday with the boys 

then he brought them home one day without telling you and was expected to get his ass Whopped but you were drinking vodka and crying while watching Cars so

yeah you were the perfect roommate for him

you drink together

saturday may be for the boys but sunday is for drinking your problems away with your roommate 

can’t cook but will make BOMB desserts for you both every friday...also fridays are pizza nights and you both order a large cheese pizza with ranch on the side and a pint of dr.pepper

yall have the same diet but he has a six-pack and you don’t so you call bullshit on health and everything it is

both of you fall asleep on the couch all the time, TV still playing the game soundtrack with the controllers on the floor, blinking from low battery

jeno alwayswakes up before you, and he doesn’t admit it, but he loves to watch you sleep

you just look so...ethereal 

even with the drool

ANYWAY

you are one of the bros...he’s even taken a shit when you took a shower before -- that’s how close you are 

then one day you get dressed up real pretty and he’s making fun of you, laughing “you never look this nice who’s holding you at gunpoint”

“i’m going on a date jeno hop off my DICK”

“,,,what”

immediately felt defensive and was questioing who could like you and why you were going on a saturday night when it was busy on the streets and also please call the guy and cancel the date because he wants to watch toy story with you and eat pasta why are you going out with someone has he met him why haven’t you told jeno about this guy you know what you should just not go

and it’s when you walk out the door rolling your eyes, promising to be back home before 9pm with a cute shirt on and nice perfume on when jeno realizes 

that damn he hates to see you leave,,,but he loves to watch you go

(and he might have the teeniest, weeniest crush on you) 

lee donghyuck

the type to never clean the dishes and always makes you do them even if he cooks because he hates the feeling of wet food

then one day he sees you v e r y stressed over school work and he just...cleans the whole house

you come back from the library and you’re like,,,the fuck where’s haechan and what have you done with him

in turn, you buy him a headset that he’s been wanting for the past year...and you think he’s about to propose to you after you give them to him

but in all reality he’s just so happy that you even remembered something so trivial...like he talking about them once (1) and you remembered?

...cute bitch

he’s a big prankster, but in an endearing way, so whenever he goes too far you never really stay mad because he’s just a little unaware of the anger his pranks cause

plus you always get back at him 

always :)

you both are basically the same people; you’re passionate about your studies and he’s passionate about gaming and dancing

yall are the bad bitches that no one messes with 

BET that yall wear matching fits whenever you two go out together

you get together to watch his favorite youtubers do let’s plays of popular games

one day yall sit down to watch some outlast 2

and boy

did you underestimate the scare factor

so now you’re three episodes deep into the let’s play and your head is buried in haechans stomach because you’re laying down facing away from the TV, clinging to the poor boy

he doesn’t know if his heart is beating so fast because of the jumpscare or because of the way you look up at him when you ask if the scary part is over yet

he doesn’t like seeing you scared with tears in your eyes...but the way you’re clinging to him makes him want to watch a thousand more scary episodes...

...if it means you’ll cuddle with him

na jaemin

the best roommate you could ever ask for

he loves to clean and cook, not to mention he’s an absolute sweetheart!!!!!!!

you started to live with him because you had posted an ad on a website for a roommate and he sent back a reply

but the texts used so many of (=｀ω´=) these emojis you just assumed it was a girl

he was not

every night before you go to bed, he’ll walk into your room and whisper “good night, sleep well” to you before petting you head and walking out

people always wonder if you’re dating, but you always reply that it’s just the way he is

until one night you invite your (asshole) project partner to your apartment and she flirts with him endLESSLY,,, not doing her work or anything, just talking with jaems

like it’s pissing you off, and you think it’s pissing him off, and you’re about to send her home when you notice the storm outside and you realize,,,, you’re too good of a person to do that

so she sleeps on the couch, and you do the same, just so you can keep an eye on her and so that she isn’t left alone with jaemin at any point (poor boy looked like he’s about to combust if she tries to talk to him again) 

and jaemin does his usual routine even with the extra company, stroking your head and even going as far as to place a kiss on your forehead

“what about me, do I get a kiss” the girl annoyingly asked

“no, you’re not yn” and hE WALKS AWAY AND CLOSES THE DOOR TO HIS ROOM 

there’s silence in your head as you process his words, a little shocked and confused as to what he means, but most of all, your thoughts consist of;

oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit

you might have just fallen for him (let’s face it, you’ve been in love with him (just not as long as he’d been in love with you)) 

zhong chenle

not going to lie, you two did NOT get along in the beginning

you were each other’s first roommates, and you knew he was extroverted, but you underestimated the differences between your personalities

like,,, no please don’t invite the dreamies over again for the eighth time this week I can’t focus on homework with all the screaming

but even with all the head-butting, the chores are split evenly because he’s practicing to ‘be marriage material for his future wife’

you don’t care as long as he just does what he’s supposed to, and you two aren’t exactly the closest

but there are times when you connect, like on lazy Sunday afternoons where you both just relax on the couch...anywaY

and he always rolls his eyes, telling you that ‘you need to stop being a hermit and make some friends’

‘get some confidence’

‘why don’t you put any effort into how you dress’

it hurts a little...you know you’re not the prettiest and you don’t really try anyway

but to have it pointed out to you just...stings

and after a guy rejects you (after you built up courage for a whole years to confess to him) your confidence is at an all-time low (he said no because ‘you were too bland’ like wtf fUCk you)

and you’re just crying and eating spaghetti o’s, telling chenle as oon as you walk into the door that you’re ‘too sensitive for his bullshit today’ 

to which chenle doesn’t care... then he sees your puffy eyes and asks wha happens

you tell him, and he just gets...angry

(and jealous?)

he goes on a tangent, mocking the guy, saying that ‘you’re the most doen-to-earth natural beauty’ he’s ever seen and that ‘any guy who doesn’t fall in love with your cute sarcastic personality’ is dumber than a rock

he grumbles for the rest of the night, sitting and watching movies with you; it makes your heart swell that he’s getting so mad for you

and at the end of the mini-movie night, and he strokes your hair saying  that you’re ‘his little introvert’,

you decide that ‘opposite attract’ is 100% true

(and chenle notices that you have very pretty lips)

park jisung

you two are dorm roommates at a dance school, and y’all are so cute all the teachers LOVE you

like you both just spend so much time together it’s ridiculous

yall walk to class together, then from class to class together, eat lunch together, after school activities, walk back to the dorms, meet each other’s friends, go out on the weekends together...everything

it feels weird to not be with him

(the teachers have a bet that you’ll be dating before your senior year)

the dorm is just a studio apartment with two bedrooms (your parents both pay a lot for space) 

so chores aren’t too hard, in fact, you both usually spend the last few hours of daylight on Sunday nights straightening up your apartment from the hectic week before, to start off completely fresh and new

nothing big ever happens on Sundays around the home, but one day jisung (who went to hang out with chenle (he invited you but you pouted and said you had too much hmwk)) found a little puppy on the side of the road

and then proceeded to sneak into the dorms with it, hiding it under his shirt

when he showed you what he found, you couldn’t be mad...it was just so cute (both jisung’s little smile and the puppy) 

but you noticed it was shivering, and you whined, ‘jisung you didn’t even notice it was cold oH My GoD, go get it some water and food’ while you set up a nest of blankets for the little guy

hours later when the puppy had eaten and subsequently fallen asleep in your lap, you turned to jisung

‘let’s name it mousie’

‘what that’s dumb’

‘it’s not dumb! i wanna name it that because it looks like you whenever you sleep! it's so cute hehehe’

you thought jisung was WHAT when he slept

jisung didn’t talk for a whole minute, drinking in your words and thinking about them over and over again, in the meantime you were just smiling down at the puppy

your cheeks were red with happiness and your nose was a little red from sneezing (because the puppy was covered in pollen from being outside) and your gaze was filled with such love that jisung shivered

you let out a sigh and plopped your head on his shoulder, and all his feelings he’d ever had for you exploded in his chest, and he tensed (though if you noticed, you didn’t day anything)

you just kept and petting the dog

and damn did jisung want to be that dog

#jeno #jaemin #haechan #mark #jisung #renjun #chenle #nct dream reactions #nct dream #jeno fluff #jaemin fluff #mark fluff #haechan fluff #renjun fluff #chenle fluff #jisung fluff #nct dream fluff #nct #nct fluff #park jisung #mark lee #nct reactions #nct dream bullet point #nct cute #mark imagines #jeno imagines #jaemin imagines #renjun imagines #chenle imagines #jisung imagines

[hakasims]

Shitty Luca Movie Recap, Episode 4

Can’t Watch Nina, Even For Luca?

Don’t Worry, Me Neither. Goodbye.

.

..

...

Ok, fine, I’ll talk about the damn thing.

So it’s a warm September night, and I’m in the mood for a Luca Marinelli feature. In my infinite wisdom I choose Nina. “It’s directed by a woman,” I reason, “and women know what’s up.” ‘What’s up’ in this particular case is code for ‘how to frame beautiful men for the female gaze’. Because women can be auteurs, too, and being an auteur means making movies about your own personal wank material.

Turns out, sometimes a woman’s wank material consists less of a gorgeous male form and more of fascist architecture. We’ll discuss the former in due time, but for now, what’s Nina even about? Well, at its core it’s a simple story about a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants, set against the backdrop of the Rome that is almost entirely empty due to most people leaving for the summer. This could have been a fairly straightforward coming-of-age film, but Nina is too indie and up its own ass for that. Literally nothing of note happens in this movie, and it’s all long static wide shots of empty streets, endless stairs, and domineering largeness of Rome’s most famous fascist buildings such as the Palace of Italian Civilization, the Sapienza University of Rome, Palazzo dei Congressi, and, most prominently, the Fountains Hall. (Google what they look like if you don’t know.) Now, I’m guessing those locations weren’t chosen by accident. They could have easily added to the creepiness of the movie — and I’m assuming creepiness was intended; otherwise how do you explain these hoverboarding nuns?

Anyway, the employment of the locations could have been atmospheric and thematic had the shots not been so bland. But they are. Bland, flat, and always looking the same no matter what is happening in the scene. Usually audiences are willing to sit through slow uneventful movies because of interesting visuals or characters worthy of attention, but Nina has neither. The titular character herself is tedious. Even her bad fashion sense is bad in a boring way that doesn’t tell you anything about her. Is she stuck in perpetual adolescence? Is she searching to get in touch with her sensuality? Who knows. The only thing I’m certain of is that she needs to learn to tuck her tops into her bottoms.

Nina spends her days giving singing lessons, going to Chinese calligraphy classes, eating cake, exercising and taking midnight walks in the empty city. She wants to go to China in September — it’s the closest thing to a goal she has — yet she’s done no preparations, and instead of learning Mandarin she’s studying calligraphy. And she’s real bad at it, too.

There are reoccurring visual elements in the movie besides the vast emptiness: stairs, white columns, a jogger, a red dress, animals… You’d think those were very straightforward symbols, but they’re used too sporadically and inconsistently to hold any meaning. For example, animals. Nina is tasked with both helping out in a pet store and house-sitting an apartment with a German shepherd (a good boy named Homer), a guinea pig and a tank full of fish. The instructions she’s given are absurd, like feeding the dog sleeping pills and putting the guinea pig on a diet. And then there’s a supposedly American TV show always playing in and out of diegesis about dogs living in cages and swimming happily in pools, and it looks and sounds like a video off the political section on the dog version of YouTube. It contains timeless classics like “You are a dog born in the age of consumerism” and “Depression is an evil illness now spreading amongst dogs of every breed, dogs belonging to every social class.” The butter commercial from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend could never. And I wish the whole movie was as surreal as this TV program but unfortunately it’s as bland and directionless as Nina herself.

And boy is it directionless. There aren’t any subplots in the movie, no cause and effect, no acts, no structure, no flow; only scenes that happen, and I can’t even find any reasons for the order in which they happen. The scenes also don’t start or end; they just interrupt each other, not leaving any emotional impact. For example, there’s a scene where Nina sees her future self. She’s on one of those midnight walks with the good boy Homer when she sees a couple being romantic. The woman is wearing a long red dress, and the man is in all black. The shot is wide, so it’s impossible to see their faces, but the woman is obviously Nina:

And the man is definitely Luca. I recognized his ass. I’m not joking, guys. It’s his ass:

Also I was later directed to the website of the photographer who took the set photos, and yes, it’s Nina and Luca.

I never forget an ass.

Anyway, Nina, who at this point hasn’t properly met Luca’s character, Fabrizio, sees herself from the future acting romantic with him, and doesn’t react. We don’t even know if she recognizes herself or him or whether it’s even a real scene or a dream. How are we supposed to empathize with a heroine who isn’t allowed to react to her environment?

Whatever, it’s time to talk about Fabrizio. He plays the cello and he’s obnoxious. That’s it. He first appears as a patron of Caffé Palombini, the real-world café Nina frequents (and buys her cakes at). She’s drinking her usual milk shake and reading. At some point, their eyes meet, but neither says anything, and then Nina gets up and runs after the good boy Homer who decided to take a little stroll by himself. She leaves all her things behind: her milk shake, her handbag, at least three books, a whole stack of paper for calligraphy, and her diary. It’s obvious she’s going to come back as soon as she gets the dog. And yet before her feet are even out of frame, Fabrizio gets up, goes to her table and fucking steals her diary!

His next several appearances are random and sporadic, and it looks like he’s stalking Nina, but by the time of his first actual scene she is following him for some reason. Obviously, he can’t let a woman outcreep him, so he ambushes her:

He tells her blankly, “You’re following me,” but I think this scene deserves better dialogue. Thankfully, we have a whole well of predator/maiden media to pull from.

Though I personally believe this is the most appropriate line:

Fabrizio lets Nina know he has her diary in the dickiest way possible: he quotes from it to let her know that he’s read it. He then informs her that he’ll only give it back to her if she continues following him. And it’s not blackmail; “it’s an agreement.” What an asshole! I’m weeping for the dignified cuckoldry of Joseph.

And what was the purpose of that “agreement” plot point if the next time they meet is by chance? Quirky love interest writing, duh. So quirky that the accidental meeting happens when Nina is walking past a phone booth where Fabrizio is… doing a phone prank? I don’t know, I got nothing. Anyway, he’s annoyed their meeting is unintentional on Nina’s part, but he returns her diary, and I guess they start dating? He watches her sing once with what could only be described as a complete absence of emotions:

In the next scene she watches him play the cello after which they go on a date. Nina is wearing the red dress from the vision, but Fabrizio’s shirt is different. I fucking give up.

Their next (second?) date is a romantic dinner on Nina’s roof, and they’re dancing for entirely too long. She then tells him she’s scared of how much she’s enjoying his company, gives him a ridiculously chaste kiss goodnight and… completely ghosts him afterwards. And if you didn’t dislike Fabrizio before, you will now as he starts calling Nina at ungodly hours (including 5:30 am) and leaving her very whiny and increasingly more passive-aggressive, entitled, and accusatory voicemails. At some point he even leaves a voicemail for the fucking dog! He’s like, “Homer, I’m worried, meet me at the café.” Again, quirky love interest writing: extortion, phone pranks and a voicemail for a dog.

Fabrizio then lets Nina know he’ll be leaving town in three days in case she’d like to see him one last time or whatever. And she never fucking does! In any other movie she’d be chasing through the airport, but here she just drops him like he’s a well-tucked shirt! She tells the kid she’s befriended (she hangs out with an eleven-year-old boy the whole movie, don’t worry about it) that she’s afraid to be “like everyone else”, with a job and a boyfriend, so she doesn’t even say goodbye to Fabrizio. At some point she goes for a walk with the good boy Homer, and Fabrizio is also there, and they just miss each other. Even fate isn’t interested in that romance.

And then all the fascist buildings get covered in gigantic paper figurines, and the red-dressed Nina runs into Fabrizio’s arms. Because of course.

Nina is one of those movies where the main theme — a struggle to grow up — is obvious, but the rest of the elements are a mess only the writer-director could decipher. And I don’t really care. Again, I had to read Japanese postmodernists at university. What I do care about is the male form I mentioned at the start. I know I have no one but myself to blame for my expectations of how the director should have framed Luca’s body or face, but it’s one thing to frame him blandly and a completely different thing to isolate him as the only character (or actor) she’s deeply uninterested in filming competently. Everyone else in the movie gets their fair share of close-ups and decent lighting whilst Luca — whose name is literally second in the credits — gets, um, neglected.

This is his introduction:

These are literally all his close-ups:

Should I even count this last one? What’s with the lighting? Like, this is as well-lit as his face gets:

Oh, the shot is too wide and you can’t see his face properly? Well, tough poop:

Are you kidding me with this shit?

Nina may not be objectively the most terrible of the movies Luca’s been in: I’d argue both Mary of Nazareth and L’ultimo terrestre are worse, as is Slam, whose time’s a-coming. Nor is it the movie where Luca appears the least (The Great Beauty’s literal one minute of screen time is saying hi). But it’s the only movie I have no reasons to watch: it’s blandly shot, poorly structured, badly themed — and it’s actively obstructing Luca’s beauty and charisma. So no matter which film you’ll ask me to do next, at least in terms of the visual component of my posts, we have nowhere to go but up.

#luca marinelli #nina #nina 2012 #sh*tty luca movie recap

[loopy777]

Well then who would you have Zuko train under if not Piandao? What was this person like? Or did Zuko train himself?

My short answer is that if Zuko has to have a named sword-teacher, then it should be literally anyone we haven’t met yet. Having one sword-teacher character in the extended cast, and then it turns out that everyone who uses a sword was trained by him, is one of my least favorite things to happen to Expanded Universes. Please, let’s not allow the creativity to die! We can have more than one person in the entire world who teaches swords, and they don’t even have to know each other!

For a longer answer, I also object to Piandao as Zuko’s teacher because in martial arts, Piandao and Zuko use two completely different weapons. We call them both “sword” in English, but in Chinese martial arts traditions, they’re called by different names and use completely different techniques.

Piandao’s sword is a “jian,” nicknamed “The Gentleman of Weapons,” and is defined by its straight double-edged blade. It’s a versatile weapon, capable of stabbing and slicing. It’s called the “Gentleman” because it is considered more of an upper-class weapon, requiring precision and thus more training, as well as longer (and more expensive) construction time (which doesn’t at all look like what ‘Sokka’s Master’ showed us, but oh well).

Zuko’s swords are “dao,” nicknamed “The General of Weapons.” The kind Zuko uses are sometimes translated as “sabre” into English to try to distinguish it, but “dao” can even be applied to knives. The defining characteristics here are a curved blade with only one cutting edge. The kind Zuko uses are usually heavier, to bring more weight to the chopping techniques favored for this weapon. It became favored for soldiers because it was said that it only took a week of training to become competent with it. And they can be made more easily.

So, even if we ignore the backstory ascribed to Piandao by the AtLA website that casts him as a deserter who’d never be allowed near a prince, it doesn’t make sense to me that Zuko would be sent to a master of the jian to be taught how to use a common soldier’s dao. It makes more sense to me that Zuko picked up the dao during his exile because it’s a common weapon he could lay his hands on easily, it’s simple to learn, and he could pick it up without a full-time training regime. Perhaps he found someone who could give him some instruction, but only for the brief time he was in port during his hunt for the Avatar. Maybe there were several such instructors who gave Zuko a half-day’s worth of lessons at a time. Maybe Zuko taught himself; he might have obtained instructional scrolls, but since it’s a common soldier’s weapon, perhaps he even just observed some of the Fire Army dudes all around him.

I mean, even the local cop dudes in Ba Sing Se’s lower ring were carrying these kinds of swords, which Zuko used to his advantage when Jet burst into that tea shop and he had to lay hands on a blade quickly. If Zuko was trained to use the jian, he would have been in trouble.

So it’s a combination of wanting a little more actual history/culture in my modern American take on wuxia, and also having a pet peeve for Expanded Universes that don’t actually expand things in favor of making the world smaller in order to get fans to clap when they hear a name they recognize. It doesn’t help that the source for this notion that Piandao trained Zuko is a dumb, mostly unfunny story that ends with a repeat of a gag we’d already seen in the very first episode of the cartoon (although the panel where the gAang are holding up signs for the person they want to win is chuckle-worthy).

If I had to invent an instructor for Zuko, though, I like the idea of an authority figure of some kind. Zuko uses his dao when he’s undercover and/or a fugitive, so I think the contrast of him learning from a strict law’n’order “honor means looking your opponent in the face and declaring who your parents are and never EVER attacking your countrymen” type would be fun. I’m not sure how Zuko would have met up with this person, though. Perhaps because he was a Firebender, he had to get a lowly guard of some kind to teach him? Or perhaps his ship was stuck in port for repairs for a week at some point, and he killed the time by training with the local recruits and their hard-nosed sergeant? Or perhaps this person was a crew member on the ship, and either died tragically at some point before the series began or else transferred to get away from the dishonored brat stuck on a snipe hunt. There’s all kinds of fun possibilities.

#Anonymous

[rainbuckets8]

Why you should watch RWBY

TL;DR:

Summary: RWBY is an epic fantasy with themes like found family, the struggle to remain hopeful, the younger generation growing up, villain redemption, and systemic evils.

Strengths: RWBY has unique and memorable characters. The show is smart. It has excellent cinematography and animation. It has representation. It tackles hard topics. It’s got incredible music and it’s free on RT’s website.

Weaknesses: RWBY has some early growing pains, specifically volume 2’s finale, as well as budget and polish. Later on, volume 4 is weaker than the rest. Volume 8's finale is extremely distressing for a lot of viewers (and we haven't seen the follow up to those events yet). The fandom can be bad at times.

Misinformation: The early volumes being bad, the racism plot line, and the animation (not the same as “budget and polish”) are not as bad as you may have heard from YouTube.

Suggested viewing order

Red Trailer, White Trailer, Black Trailer, Yellow Trailer

Volume 1

Volume 2

Volume 3

Volume 4 Character Short

Volume 4

Volume 5 Weiss Character Short, Volume 5 Blake Character Short, Volume 5 Yang Character Short

Volume 5

Volume 6 Adam Character Short

Volume 6

Volume 7

Volume 8

(I did my best to make this spoiler-free. When there are spoilers, they’re worded ambiguously enough that someone new to the show would never guess what’s going to happen just by reading this.)

What to expect

The world of Remnant is filled with monsters called the creatures of Grimm. Warriors called Huntsmen and Huntresses defend humanity. Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang go to school to become the next generation of heroes. Together they make Team RWBY (pronounced, “Ruby”)! Joining them is team JNPR (“Juniper”), made up of Jaune, Nora, Pyrrha, and Ren. But evils even more dangerous than the Grimm are ready to make their move, and school quickly becomes an afterthought…

(I mention these next two topics specifically bc they can immediately turn someone away based on bad expectations.) There is a fantasy school setting, but RWBY is not a show about school. School topics are not a dominant idea: it seems to resemble a setting like Harry Potter, but the actual focus of the show rarely touches on things like classes or homework or tests, and we quickly move on. There is romance and it has a role in the plot, but RWBY is not a romance show. On the scale of romance in FMAB to She-Ra, RWBY falls somewhere in the middle.

What is RWBY about, then? RWBY is like an epic fantasy or high fantasy, despite first appearances. Perhaps not every genre convention is followed, but at its core, RWBY is about an epic struggle of good and evil.

RWBY contains themes such as found family, the struggle to remain hopeful, the younger generation growing up, villain redemption, and systemic evils.

Strengths of the show

The characters are unique and memorable. One of the cool things is that they all draw inspiration from a real life fairy tale, myth, or something else. They designs are all top notch. One character who died with extremely little screen time even got so much fandom love, they included the character in a mid-hiatus short later. The characters have unique weapons, too; in the world of Remnant, a weapon is an extension of ones’ soul, and they reflect the variety of their owners. They’re also just plain cool; Monty was famous for following the “Rule of Cool.” And their individual stories are all compelling and interesting.

The show is smart. As a fandom, we generally pick up on the narrative hints the creators are dropping. And our predictions usually come true, but not in a way that makes the show predictable and boring. We very rarely guess exactly what will happen, but we have some similar idea of it. It’s just excellent foreshadowing.

RWBY also likes to play with tropes, as an extension of this. Often it will challenge them, or subvert expectations. In other cases, RWBY uses tropes to avoid showing us what we already know will happen. This occurs in both characters and plot. For example…

SLIGHT SPOILERS FOR VOLUME ONE FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH: Jaune’s entire character arc is about trying to be the anime protagonist, and learning that he doesn’t have to do things alone, and it’s ok to be a support main. The show sets up the narrative in a way that looks like, oh of course the direction it will go is him becoming the main character, but then it destroys toxic masculinity instead.

Our characters are smart, too. Plot-induced stupidity generally doesn’t happen. (A few big mistakes or errors in this regard aren’t actually the fault of the narrative, either, but animation and miscommunication and failure to execute. And those aren’t common.) It goes beyond just “not being dumb,” however. The villains’ plans are incredibly clever, and our heroes sometimes even guess at the usual “plot twists.”

The cinematography is just incredible. There are numerous freeze frames with extreme attention to detail that reveal character motivations or arcs or foreshadowing, there are many effective cuts and moving parts, there are soooo many parallels and callbacks, and visual cues such as lighting and color all are used appropriately to convey emotion and assist the narrative. It is one of the biggest overlooked strengths of the show, imo, simply because a lot of people in the fandom don’t notice these things as much for whatever reason, or else don’t give as much praise about them.

The animation is extremely good as well. Budget issues and technology issues aside (which means a lack of polish), the actual animation? The fight choreography, and all the other parts of animation that aren’t just “expensive CGI” are all wonderful. You can have very shiny, polished turds after all, and RWBY is like the opposite: not very polished, especially early on, but very well animated. All the trailers, volume 1 episode 8, the volume 1 finale, the volume 2 penultimate episode, and basically everything else hold up extremely well even today. If anything, the worst fight animation was in volumes 4 and 5 because of Maya growing pains, and those are an example of being more polished, but not necessarily better animated. Animation of faces has always been good, animation of characters has always felt lively. Aside from a few small actual hiccups (that one person running across rooftops for instance), it’s well done.

There are LGBTQ+ characters. The treatment of one of the recent trans characters, in volume 8, was nothing short of amazing. They worked with a VA who was trans. The moment of canon confirmation was important to the character for backstory, because of course that affects the character’s life, but not the only important thing about the character. The representation is not in-your-face or pandering. And there is a split of representation among the main cast and the minor characters, with promises of more to come (notably they’ve said they’re working on more mlm for future volumes, too).

RWBY is not afraid to tackle hard topics. It deals with things like mental illness, systematic racism, and cycles of abuse. It’s not because the show is trying to earn “gritty and dark” points, it’s because those are some of the topics that real people have to struggle with as well. And the show handles most or all of them very well, in a way that shows respect and an honest attempt to depict these things as best they can. (NOTE ABOUT VOLUME 8: THERE IS A VERY DIFFUCLT CONVERSATION CURRENTLY HAPPENING. I am on the side of, let’s wait and see what happens next because the story isn’t over, so we haven’t really seen the fall out. But I understand why this paragraph feels really difficult to agree with if you've seen the volume 8 finale. I trust the track record of the rest of the show, personally.)

As an example, the show has a theme that villains are rarely evil just because. A lot of villains choose to do bad things because they were hurt in some way. Some lived in poverty; some were hurt by racism; many of them are victims of abuse. But the show doesn’t make excuses for them. It’s possible to be both sympathetic and still choose evil over and over again (that’s called tragic). The ones who eventually do try to do good again are not always forgiven, either.

The music is amazing. I can probably count on my hands the number of times I’ve heard someone say otherwise, which is astonishing when you consider this fandom.

It’s also free on RT’s website. (A paid, “FIRST” subscription removes ads and lets you see new episodes one week early, but they all eventually release for free.)

Weaknesses of the show

Early volumes’ growing pains exist, much like most or all other shows. (Even some of the greatest were not immune to this, like ATLA.) In this case, however, it’s a little bit rougher. A large reason why is that this was kind of the first big thing from RT to ever come out. If you remember back almost a decade ago, their only other big thing at the time was RvB, which was machinima. They pretty much started from scratch with everything, from assets to VAs to animation to writing. Imagine if a random twitch streamer, like Ninja (idk who’s popular these days) said one day, “OK let me just direct something that’s intended to be the next great movie series of all time, like Star Wars, with a $4 bill and an iPhone camera.” Then went out and actually made something. Of course it would be rough…but then it turns out the movie is actually really good. And then you get to watch over the next several years as everything gets better and better until it’s honest-to-god comparable to the MCU. That’s kind of what happened with RWBY.

One specific growing pain was the volume 2 finale. Pretty much everything else up until that point, I love about the show. But the finale just fails to deliver on the build up of tension from other episodes. Some of it is because of later plot developments that we didn’t know at the time; some of it is because of just not great writing; some of it is because of just not great animation; and yes, some of it is budget. Regardless, it’s a low point for the show.

Speaking of, the budget for the early volumes is super small. The infamous volume one shadow people, the infamous person jumping across the rooftops in volume two, and just production quality isn’t high compared to a major release from some established studio. These are real weaknesses of the show that for some people, make it unwatchable, and if that’s you, that’s ok.

One last weakness of the show, the screen time per episode, especially early on, is NOT a full 20 minutes like you may expect of an anime (or anime-inspired-western-media, for those of you who will die on the “RWBY is not an anime” hill). This is a trend that has stuck with the show, a shorter run time per episode, for generally the entire lifetime. On one hand, it means it’s a little less daunting to catch up or rewatch than the number of episodes might imply. On the other, early on, some episodes have a little weird pacing. It also means the writing had to adjust for this, so while RWBY got really good at telling a story within a shorter amount of time, there’s also challenges with that too. Perhaps one of the notable ones is the pacing, with slower moments sometimes feeling like it takes up too much screen time, or not enough. Volume 4 was a particular struggle for the crew, both because they switched animation engines and also for the story.

Common complaints that I don’t agree with

I don’t agree that the early volumes were actually bad overall. Growing pains, yes, but not bad. I attribute that complaint to overly focusing on one character’s storyline, back when it wasn’t clear there was so much more to come and before people realized the show would challenge the tropes instead of falling into them. It’s pretty much just volume 1 when people say this anyway, most of them I’ve heard admit that volume 2 was a lot better (except the finale) and almost everyone loves volume 3. And looking back on it, I do think volume 1 holds up.

Tying into this, the racism plot line is another common complaint. I don’t think it’s actually executed quite that badly. I think it makes sense for there to be regional differences in the amount of racism we see, it just so happened that we only saw a very small and isolated environment, Beacon, for much of the early volumes. (Incidentally, that’s actually similar the environment I myself grew up in.) It’s not perfect, though. But there’s no doubt that the later volumes do a better job portraying this. Again, I attribute it mostly to people not knowing how long the show would run for at the time, so of course if that’s all we saw, it would’ve been bad. But it’s not. I have a lot of respect for Miles and Kerry for even attempting to handle the racism topic in the first place. And for the faults that DO exist in this plot line, I credit them for learning and growing past that too, and doing better in later volumes.

The animation is not bad. I’ve already touched on that earlier, but people confuse “budget and polish” with “animation.” Give me RWBY any day over Michael Bay’s Transformers: no matter how much polish those robots have, they’re still a confusing mess to try and follow. And the polish isn’t even an issue once we get past the growing pains of Maya and get a bigger budget, because wow does this show look good now.

Between these three complaints I hear about often, I think those are the biggest ones. And they’re all generally done in bad faith, based not on just those but on other more provocative statements people also make with them. That’s part of my issue with the fandom, specifically the vocal but small parts of the fandom, because they’re just repeating these things from early days that aren’t true. But YouTubers gotta get those rage and hate clicks somehow, right? Unfortunately it discredits the show a lot and influences other people’s opinions into not giving it a fair chance, because it’s become a narrative of “RWBY IS BAD” when they all won’t shut up about it. So yeah, fandom can be bad, join at your own discretion. (Of course, all fandoms have annoying parts, and my interactions with the fandom have been good overall, otherwise.)

Onto other complaints, some say the cast is bloated. I don’t agree, but I don’t think this one is in bad faith. I think we get the important characters as much screen time as we can, and the minor characters don’t actually detract from that; one of the differences between good minor characters and bad ones, is that bad ones take up too much time. RWBY has a ton of characters but many of the minor ones don’t actually take up too much time. So it appears bloated, but actually I don’t think it is.

Finally, a small word on the no-no topics. Adam, and Monty. Adam is like the champion of the Monty topic. Which essentially boils down to “Miles and Kerry are ruining Monty’s vision for the show.” Toxic fandom is truly awful and I have no respect for anyone who says anything like that. Shame on all of you. This isn’t really anything negative about the show, but the fandom, and tbf all fandoms have toxic parts. But toxic fandom can be a real and valid reason to not watch a show. Thankfully they seem fewer in number these days, but I think they’ve evolved into hiding behind other characters or topics, so you know. Beware. Again, it's not too hard to avoid them or block them, and my interactions otherwise with most fans have been good.

#rwby

[jurassicparkpodcast]

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Season 2 | SPOILER Breakdown & Review

Be advised – this article contains heavy spoilers for the second season of Camp Cretaceous. Make sure to check out our non-spoiler review before you read this piece. If you’ve seen the entirety of Season Two, please feel free to read this review.

If you read my non-spoiler review of the second season of Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous, then you may have noted my choice to refer directly to coming back to the spoiler section for several bits of key information. That is primarily because the events of this second season take place at a previously un-documented timeframe – meaning everything which occurs is ‘new’ – even if it may have nods to earlier and latter parts of the timeline. 

With that said, we’re going to use this article to talk about some of the juicier parts of the second season of the show. Let’s dive in.

The key part to the second series of the show is the idea of the emergency beacon on Main Street being used by the kids to summon some help to the island – making their rescue a possibility. I enjoyed how the beacon was uncovered by the kids within the Jurassic World Inside Guide – a nice nod to some of the real documents like the Jurassic World Staff Book we have in the real-world. I also enjoyed how this sequence was used as an opportunity to explain how lots of technology may be hidden around the park as ‘nature’ – helping to retroactively explain how the park may have functioned without us even realising in Jurassic World. We also get to see the Jurassic World Discovery Walk (a new attraction!) during this segment, building out the park a little more, and also spend more time in T-Rex Kingdom, which was a welcome addition. This sequence also features a gut wrenching flashback – with Darius having a moment where Ben’s fall from the train in Season One is replaced with his dad falling. This was a heart wrenching moment – and really sets up the guilt arc which is a key driver for Darius throughout the second season. Of note is the fact that the beacon message does change from ‘Sent’ to ‘Received’ – something which is not touched upon again in the second season. This sets up a couple of interesting options for a third season – something which we will discuss in another article here on the website soon.

The next interesting element I wanted to talk about is the implementation of the veterinary area of the park in Episode Two. This was a fun opportunity to peak underneath the hood of the functioning Jurassic World a little bit more – seeing where sick animals may have been quarantined and treated. I particularly appreciated how the animals in cages here included a Parasaurolophus and Stegosaurus – a fun nod to the same animals being caged by Ludlow’s team in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. I loved the way Grim, Chaos and Limbo were introduced during this sequence – and also loved seeing them squaring off with the Stegosaurs, showing that sometimes predators would rather leave groups of Herbivores than pick a fight where they would be outnumbered. This is a nice nod to the real palaeontological understanding that herbivores moved in larger herds to protect them from predators. Kenji and Yaz also got some interesting development in Episode Two, too – and I feel like the first two episodes were some of the strongest in terms of the areas of the park they explored, and also the animal behaviours which they showed throughout the moments we spend with dinosaurs in these episodes. This is continued in Episode Three, however – which introduces us to the watering hole, and some fun accompanying lore to flesh out the behaviour of the dinosaurs in the series a little bit more. 

Episode Three introduces us to the watering hole – and is arguably my favourite episode because of the time it takes to really bring back the ‘natural beauty’ element of the dinosaurs and the environments in the Jurassic franchise. During these sequences we get some interesting bits of information – including Darius sharing that Doctor Grant stated that predators and prey may be able to co-exist at a watering hole if the right conditions were met. It is nice to hear Grant name dropped to remind us of the universe we are in, and this is a nice way of explaining the Ceratosaurus also at the watering hole. During this sequence the Ceratosaurus also encounters the kids but chooses to ignore them and walk off – a nice call-back to the more docile behaviour we see exhibited from this animal in Jurassic Park III.  Of note during this episode is the idea that the Stegosaurus has shed its plate as it has grown and rubbed itself against a tree – something which Sammy compares to modern-day animals, and we also see a Parasaurolophus inhabiting a river – calling back to where they were located in the park. Although we don’t get much of it in the latter parts of the season, the steps taken to really add to the dinosaurs behaviours in the earlier episodes feels rewarding and helps to flesh them out as natural animals in their own right. 

Another interesting note in this episode is the fact that Brooklynn, Sammy and Yaz revisit the genetics lab where Doctor Wu and Eddie were in Season One, to find it now stripped back and empty. This suggests that, much like we see in the film, Hoskins may have ordered his people to extract assets from across the island – which does then call into question some moments which occur later in the season. During this sequence the trio find a key card in an envelope – alongside a couple of pieces of paper which appear to contain information, potentially to do with E750’s genetics given the fact that this name is on the envelope. E750 is, if you remember, the ‘confidential’ folder we saw on Wu’s Computer in Season One – implying that this is something big. At the end of this episode we are also introduced to a campfire on the island – indicating that someone else is on the island. In Episode Four we learn that these people mercenary-type character of Hap, and two Ecotourists – Mitch and Tiff. Mitch’s character design is an overt Alan Grant reference – designed to make us feel as though we can trust him, whilst Hap feels more akin to someone like Dieter Stark. Over the course of this episode we learn a few interesting details – including the fact that the group’s boat is away refueling at Papagayo. Interestingly, this is a peninsula on the North Pacific Coast of Costa Rica – in keeping with the geography of the series. The episode ends with Hap chasing the kids after they tried to break into his yurt – only for them to be rescued at the last moment by Ben and an adult Bumpy.

Episode Five takes the time for us to explore how Ben survived – showing how he attempted to escape the jungle but inadvertently wondered into Toro’s nesting ground. This sequence is cool as it shows Toro has been hunting animals since the end of Season One – suggesting he has been taking his aggression out on Nublar’s other residents. At a couple of different moments here we see Compys surrounding Ben as he cowers – helping to create the similar sense of vulnerableness that we see in Cathy Bowman. Eventually, after snapping at Bumpy and finding himself on his own, Ben stands up to the Compys and decides to go and fight Toro. This leads to a cool sequence where Bumpy eventually saves Ben and fights Toro – although I do feel like here the kids show side of the series takes over a little bit more, as I can imagine a kid with a spear not being much of a problem for a fully grown Carnotaurus. With that said, seeing a fully grown Bumpy showdown with Toro was a nice call-back to the cut Sinoceratops vs Carnotaurus fight from Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, and I was quite excited to see Toro back for an episode as I wasn’t sure we would see this animal again in the series. 

The next episode reveals why Tiff and Mitch are truly on the island – because they are Big Game Hunters. In the yurt which was off limits Darius finds a lot of hunting tools, including a bear trap, and brutally – the head of a Sinoceratops. I was genuinely shocked at how morbid this sequence was – and think this reinforces the idea that this isn’t purely a kids show. Whilst this was mainly implied as the whole head is not shown under the cover it has over it, it was enough to shock me. I really enjoyed this reveal as I didn’t expect it – I thought it would be easy for this to be Mantah Corp, but obviously, as The Lost World shows us, there will be people out there who want to hunt these animals for a challenge. Interestingly, Mitch justifies hunting them as preserving their memory, saying that the UN will soon forget and abandon the island. I appreciated this attempt from the writers to show how the character would justify his actions as it helps to make him slightly more compelling – even if I would argue that the writing for both characters is weak here. In this episode we also see the death of Hap – who stays behind to distract the pack of three Baryonyx so that Brooklynn and Kenji can escape on a motorbike following Ben’s rescue. This was an interesting moment as it is clear Hap was written to fit the ‘villain’ stereotype and then flip it. Interestingly enough we don’t see Hap die – so whilst surviving an attack from three Baryonyx is improbable, it is possible he could return. I would argue that he was the best of the three new characters introduced in the second season of the show. We end with Yaz, Darius and Sammy at the mercy of the pair of hunters – who now want Darius to show them the watering hole so they can kill more dinosaurs. This makes sense – but may have benefitted from being slightly more fleshed out in my opinion.

This idea carries over into Episode Seven – where Darius falsely leads the pair to main street in a desperate bid to escape. There is a really cool sequence on main street here where Darius and Sammy are avoiding the couple in a way which almost mimics the Velociraptor kitchen sequence from Jurassic Park  - with them moving from cover to cover in a slow fashion. Whilst this unfolds, Brooklynn, Kenji, Yaz and Ben find an emergency bunker when Brooklynn follows a hum she has heard throughout the series – pointing to something still being operational underground. The Bunker facility appears identical to the one which we see in Jurassic World Aftermath – which poses some interesting questions for where that latter entry slots into the story given what else unfolds here. We learn that this room connects to a room where a sample is cryogenically frozen – and Kenji inadvertently begins the process of awakening it. I enjoyed everything we saw on the computer screens on this sequence – including the location of the watering hole, which appears to be near Gyrosphere Valley. This then leads into the second sequence we get with the Tyrannosaurus Rex in this series – which is, unfortunately, a sequence which suffers from the necessity for plot armour to carry the antagonists through to the final episode. Rexy tries repeatedly to bite Tiff and Mitch and misses – allowing them to escape and eventually being distracted from Darius and Sammy by lights and sounds the rest of the crew activate in the command centre. Seeing Rexy unable to kill either Tiff or Mitch when they were out in the open is one of the moments which breaks the realism of the series, in my opinion – making it a little bit harder to accept at face value.

The finale starts with Tiff and Mitch heading to the watering hole whilst the rest of the kids attempt to stop them. During this sequence we get a brutal moment where Tiff kills Grim with a single shot – reminding us that this animals are not nearly as resilient as the Indominus Rex. This stood out to me as it reminded me how easy the dinosaurs which are rampaging during Jurassic World Dominion would be to deal with – implying that something more serious may happen to prevent authorities around the world from dealing with the animals so quickly. This moment really was brutal – as although Grim was technically an antagonist, the death had a similar effect to that of Zara, with it not feeling earned. Eventually the kids manage to stop Tiff and Mitch from killing any of the other animals – and both die in ways which homage different parts of the franchise. Mitch steps on his own snare and is eaten by the Tyrannosaurus Rex whilst hanging from a tree – a fun nod to the death of Cooper in JPIII who has a similar fate at the hands of the Velociraptors. Tiff, on the other hand, makes it onto her boat (which has been moored at the dock the whole time) – and makes it on in time to escape before the kids can get onboard. As she begins to sail away it is revealed that Limbo and Chaos have made it onboard – sealing her fate, and providing a moment of Karma for the brutal execution of Grim earlier in the episode. This also serves as a fun nod to the novel – where Velociraptors were able to board the Isla Nublar supply ships. This then ends with the kids practically in the same position as the end of Season One – which does, in some ways, negate the events of the second season as it feels as though no real progress occurs. 

Overall, there are some fun sequences in Season Two of Camp Cretaceous – but it feels as though there are less memorable moments than the first season, and many of them are over-exaggerated and therefore leave you questioning their realism within the canon. Whilst the show should be granted additional freedom due to its target demographic, this undoubtedly is a canonical piece – and I feel like the second season pushed the boundaries of being a canonical entry in the series a little bit too far at times. Whilst some sequences, like a stampede sequence in Episode Seven and the Baryonyx attack in Episode Two feel well executed, other sequences, like the chase in Episode Six, feel a little bit too extreme. With that said, I think kids are definitely going to love these set pieces, so I can look past them for the impact they may have on younger fans. 

I also didn’t enjoy the lack of any presence for Mantah Corp in Season Two. Whilst I appreciated Mitch and Tiff not being agents of the organisation, as that would’ve been easy to do, I do think that having some kind of reference – whether it be another drone, or mention of another boat off shore – would have been a nice way of tying in the fact that Mantah Corp are still an active threat in this universe. Whilst I have no doubt that they will return in the future, the complete lack to acknowledge them beyond Brooklynn and Sammy name-dropping them a couple of times did seem like a shame considering the focus that was placed on season one. The issue which irked me most, however, is probably that of E750 – which is being thawed out. We will have a separate video speculating what this could be, but my biggest issue is how this sits within the canon. As per JWFK and Jurassic World Aftermath, we know that teams were sent back to recover assets and extract them off of the island – so if E750 was such a big project for Wu, then why did he leave it on the island? This makes little sense to me right now and is, in my opinion, one of the bigger issues with retrospectively building this mystery specimen into the Jurassic timeline.

With these issues highlighted, I think Season Two of Camp Cretaceous was good, but it fails to follow-up on some of the more interesting parts of the first season, and strays a little close to the boundaries of the pre-established canon present in the universe. Whilst I appreciate it is a kids show, and I can allow more due to this, I do feel like the E750 storyline has the potential to raise more questions about the rest of the lore, depending on the direction it takes – and this is a problem which can occur when retroactively building a multi-media timeline. I am interested to see how this unfolds in a third season – and I do wonder how much more we can explore on Nublar before it begins to feel stagnant. There is certainly more of the island I would like to see and explore – so I hope we get to do this in future instalments. 

I think it is fair to say I enjoyed the second season of the show – but, perhaps not as much as I did the first season, which I felt gave a little more to adult fans and those of us more familiar with the lore. With that said, I would love to hear from you! Let me know what you thought of Season Two in the comments below, and stay tuned for more Camp Cretaceous content on The Jurassic Park Podcast in the near future.

Written by: Tom Fishenden

#article #jurassic world camp cretaceous review #jurassic world camp cretaceous season two review #camp cretaceous review #camp cretaceous season two review #camp cretaceous season 2 #camp cretaceous spoilers #camp cretaceous season two spoilers #jurassic world camp cretaceous season two spoilers #jurassic world tv show spoilers #season two spoilers #camp cretaceous spoiler review #tom fishenden #tom fishenden camp cretaceous #camp cretaceous

[writing-in-the-tiny-house]

Order of Dust, with Nicholas J Evans

Follow this link to check out Order of Dust:

https://amzn.to/2Vx9LN2

Follow this link to check out The Ones Who Could Do Anything:

https://amzn.to/3ttCvCQ

The following is a transcript for this episode. For the complete transcript, please navigate to the show’s website.

[00:00:00] So I have a very important question for you, my dear friends, and this is how we're starting off this episode. Are you passionate enough about the things you like to do? And because this is this podcast, are you passionate enough about writing to be able to release something bad at first, knowing that you will get better later that going through those trials and going through the process of releasing something is part of the experience of getting better. Then you need to take a second and listen to today's guest, Nicholas J. Evans, who went from writing a collection of short stories in high school that he was convinced nobody would want to read to landing a three book deal today on Writing in the Tiny House.

[00:00:58] Hello. Hello. Hello, and welcome to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy living in a tiny house who is here to show you that you can write that work of fiction regardless of how busy you think you are. And the perfect example of that is today's guest Nicholas J. Evans. He is 30 years old. He works full time. And in his spare time, when he's not playing with his kids, he writes. And he has a beautiful message to share. And we will get to that message here in half a second. 

[00:01:58] As far as announcements go with this podcast, I have teamed up with Editor Krissy Barton, from Little Syllables Editing. She was on the show back in March, and we had a wonderful show. I fully recommend that you go back and listen to the final show that happened in March. She was here with me in the tiny house, talking about the process of editing. Anyway, I have teamed up with her to roll out kind of a new program. And I say that as a way to kind of tease.

[00:02:35] I apologize right now, but I want to let you know that fun things are rolling out, provided things work out according to a specific schedule. Sometimes I get some hairball ideas and sometimes the execution is kind of hard to do, kind of impossible to do at other times. And so we are discovering different ways that I can share my writing with you, my listeners, and also with people who don't listen to this show.

[00:03:10] So basically I have started writing some smaller things. I have blabbed on and on and on about my book about my works in progress, and I still have those. And those have certainly not been like thrown in the garbage or something stupid like that. They have been put on the back burner for a second, just because I am eager to share my writing. On this podcast I blab all day long about the tips and tricks to do it. And so I actually want to show examples. Release something for people to read sooner than a book, sooner than a full blown novel, which can take up to two years or longer to write or produce or whatever, especially if you're not already published through a major publisher.

[00:04:03] And so I have started doing some shorter things. They all tie into the books that I'm writing. They are short stories set in the same world as the books that I am working on too. And these, I am going to put on a schedule. I will tell you more about what that whole schedule will look like in a later episode of Writing in the Tiny House, but be excited.

[00:04:30] This whole process is so fun. Writing something according to a schedule is hard and awesome. And it really gets me excited about writing and it gets me more eager to share it with you, my listeners, what I can do, what I have done, some of the ideas that are in my mind. And so it's not just about advice or guidelines anymore.

[00:04:59] Now we are going to actually have the real written word to share with you on a regular basis. So I will touch base on a later episode to give better explanation and better description as to what all of this is actually going to be. But I wanted to share with you today that things are in the works. And so that's super exciting.

[00:05:26] So without further ado, let's go ahead and meet our guest. Nicholas J. Evans.

[00:05:35] I'm originally from New York and I've moved a lot over the course of becoming an author, and I'm writing novels and writing short fiction, so I lived in Delaware for a brief period of time. And I currently live in Maine with my wife and our three very young children. We have three daughters, all under the age of five and I work full time.

[00:05:56] I travel for work which means I, am not home as much as I would like to, be, but I try and use that time to my advantage. And that's where I work on a majority of my stories. So I work on them when I'm in hotels. I work on them when the kids are asleep at nap times, pretty much whenever I get the opportunity. Even going as far back as to when I started writing short stories, I would work on them on my phone, just so I would have the time during brief periods of the day.

[00:06:22] As you can see, Nick is a busy man and the idea of fitting in writing where you can fit it in is not new to most writers. Most writers do not support themselves with their craft. And so to be working a job and to be cranking out novels in his spare time is something that a lot of us are doing, which is so cool and so admirable.

[00:06:44] And so I wanted to find out a little bit more about his published works and what he's working on now.

[00:06:52] I began writing Order of Dust, which was my debut novel all the way back in 2017. I actually was working on a different novel at the time and I had hit writer's block. It was a completely different genre too. And I was like, I need something to work on. What am I going to be working on, while I'm just sitting here staring at a screen not knowing what to put down?

[00:07:11] So I began writing something that I originally thought I was going to release as a graphic novel. Actually, I began writing it in a script format with the hopes of sending it out that way. and I found that might've not been the right medium. So I turned around and started drafting it into a novel. And then around 2018, I was finished up with the second draft of it. And then I had started sending it out to publishers directly because it was my first work. I didn't want to get anything agented. I didn't think I was there yet. And I was lucky enough to get picked up by the Parliament House for a trilogy for my series. So I was very excited about that and I mean, that led to where we are now with the novel release in 2020, which was a weird time for books to release. It was a little bit of a different experience because everything had to be pushed digitally. We couldn't do signings. We couldn't do cons. We couldn't do anything. so a lot of it had to be just reaching out to different digital agencies to take care of things for us and hope that things were going to go well. Luckily enough, they did go well, which led to me working on throughout 2020 after we were already edited and everything was finished up for Order of Dust. I ended up working on the second novel of the series. And I had just finished a different novel, that I'll go into in a little bit that is actually releasing this September for a different publisher. COVID was very, very unfortunate and working from home was very difficult, but at the same time I was able to try and use as much downtime as possible to really hammer this out and give what I feel like is even a better product than the first novel. 

[00:08:48] So the name of the trilogy is For Humans, For Demons, which will make sense in the grand scheme of things? So it's For Humans For Demons. The second, book comes out January of 20 22, no release date on the third, but I am halfway through the first draft of it and very excited. And then, Like I said, I do have another novel coming out with a different publisher in September of this year. 

[00:09:11] The For Humans For Demon series is essentially about what if modern religion collapsed Similar to what we've seen in history where different religions end up taking the forefront. And this is about what if it's turned on its head and what if in a modern society what everybody believed to be true ends up not being? And everybody finds out about that truth and the chaos that ensues.

[00:09:36] So bringing that as the larger universe, it focuses on the story of one character Jackson Crow who dies at the hands of the Unascended, which essentially to bring it to better terms a soul in this universe is called a Dust and sometimes they do not ascend for different reasons. So they end up remaining and taking on a host basically. They take over a body of a living person and they hide among people. Jackson was unfortunate for him and his fiance, were assassinated by one of the Unascended, which leaves him with a little bit of a grudge, and he gets the chance from the true higher beings to come back and basically work for them to take care of the issue, which is these Unascended who are hiding as normal people are committing heinous crimes that they are not actually being targeted for. 

[00:10:28] So it's all about his story, about getting revenge. And then it slowly opens up to this bigger issue at hand, which is the world around him that is essentially collapsed because people do not have a belief structure anymore. And that goes for all of the different religions and how it affects the different groups of people, which really ends up coming out in the second and the third books

[00:10:52] So I have read Order of Dust and it is a wild ride. It is fast paced. It is exciting. It is filled with action and all of the things you could hope from a book like that. And so I wanted to figure out what was his inspiration to write a book like this.

[00:11:10] I wanted to write something That was, based on religion. I wanted to go that route. But originally when I was doing this, the only idea I had was what if somebody had to hunt people? What if somebody had this job where they had to hunt people cause they were different? And it just kept breaking down until I was like, well, what if he's also different? A lot of the influences for that book came right from graphic novels from monga, from old scifi, noire stories. So things like Philip K Dick or even things like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. A lot of inspiration from Yasuhiro Nightow who is best known for writing Trigun in the nineties and Gunn Grave. So a lot of that I want it to kind of mush together and I was like, this would just be something fun. And, and that's what I did. 

[00:12:00] Book number two was Wing Clipper, that one releases in January of 2022. And that one is going to break into the larger world. The first book was very focused on Jackson, focused on introducing characters and introducing some antagonist, but the second book really opens up. It is longer. So it won't be as fast of a read. But that was the goal. I wanted to introduce people in a way, almost like what Stephen King did with Gunslinger, the dark tower series. The first book gunslinger is very short. It's a very quick read and then slowly gets longer.

[00:12:31] That was my goal here is I want to get people drawn in and then really open it up in the second and say like look how everybody else has been affected by this. And then the third book right now is called The Arm of the Savior. In the third book, we'll close everything out in a very large scale. I've been building up to something with these hoping that it ends in a larger way than it started, where it starts very narrow, very singular, and it ends more global. And that one does not have a release date as of yet just because the second book's not even out, but I would say that's probably going to be somewhere around, early to mid 2023. 

[00:13:07] Now while his trilogy for humans for demons is with one publisher. Nick has done what many successful writers have done. And he is publishing another book under a different publisher. Another publishing house picked him up for this book for this idea. And so. Just depending on contracts and agreements, it is entirely possible for a person to put out work under various different publishing houses.

[00:13:39] And Nick has done that too with his upcoming novel that releases this month, even though in the dialogue here in the audio, it says it releases in September. We get to remember that it is now September and this interview wasn't recorded this month. So please don't get confused. 

[00:13:57] The book releasing in September is with a different publisher, Black Rose. What ended up happening was I was working on another while I was doing the editing process for Order of Dust. I wanted to work on something else, but I didn't want to dive into the second book without first working with the different content editors, the line editors to kind of get their idea and feedback on that first book. But I wanted to work on something.

[00:14:19] I had been writing a lot of shortstories, and I wanted to break it up from the normal. And at the time I had just come up to Maine for work. So I was very far away. My wife and kids were down in Delaware. On the weekends I was driving down there 10 to 12 hours to see them and then driving back So it was a lot of alone time for Monday through Friday. And I just felt like I needed to do something with this time, so I wrote the book.

[00:14:43] It's called The Ones Who Could Do Anything. And it's an urban fantasy, but it's mainly just about dealing with struggles. I don't want to give too much away, but surviving after something terrible happens. And it follows just a group of young people who find each other because of their misfortunes and discover that they have some innate abilities that lend themselves to each other. So it's, again, it's something that at first, and this is, this is what I loved when I had brought up to the publisher at first, they were like, this sounds like, like the premise of it, like something that we've read a hundred times.

[00:15:21] And I was like, I know, you know, I'm not trying to give you something that everybody already knows just by looking at the cover of the book. But luckily they were like, you know, We read the first three chapters of it. Can you send us the rest of the manuscript? And when they did, they really like, they're like, this is different.

[00:15:37] As many writers bring out a certain work or certain ideas or bring these different things to life. Oftentimes there are specific goals that they have with these things. And I wanted to find out what was the reason behind four humans were demons and this new book, because they are so different, different publishing houses.

[00:16:06] Different ideas, different concepts. And so I wanted to figure out more about that.

[00:16:11] One thing I would love for everybody to know is everything that I write and put out. I want to be very different. And I think the people who enjoy For Humans For Demons and enjoy that series, maybe would read The Ones Who Could Do Anything and feel like, this is different. It's a little bit darker and more base of reality rather than something that's completely scifi.

[00:16:33] But I want everybody to be open minded to that. I think some of my favorite authors branching from every different medium, have always tried to dabble in that a lot of their books are not linear. Obviously there are authors out there who do release very similar books and they do very well. But when I think of my favorite Neil Gaymon I don't feel like his books are the same. I feel like I pick up any of his books and they're different and that's my overall goal. And I wanted to let people know that right from the start, because I want people to pick up different books and be like, this is different from that one. And I love them for what they are. 

[00:17:06] And so came the big question. How did any of this get started? How far back does this go for him? When was the first time he put pen to paper in a creative way? And how did all that go?

[00:17:24] I appreciate this coming up because I don't get to share this a lot because I don't want them to intertwine, but I've been in bands my entire life. I was a musician for most of my life. I'm 30 now. I was in bands all through high school and everything.

[00:17:36] And then in 2011, I was in a band called Nora Stone, and we were a post hardcore group. I say we were, but they're still together. A hardcore group. And we ended up releasing a short EP and it got us on a label. We did a lot of traveling. We did a lot of touring. So were on the road, a good amount. We did Metal Mayhem Festival.

[00:17:56] We did Crowd Surf America with CHODOs and Blessed the Fall. This is all a bunch of Warp Tour bands. But we did a lot of that for a very long time. And after the birth of my first daughter, I realized I had to start dwindling it down. I had already started the career I'm in now.

[00:18:11] And I was like, what can I do? And back in high school, and when we're on the road, I would just write short stories. A lot of it, I'm going to be honest with you. If anybody remembers my yearbook shout outs to to New York, if anybody remembers my yearbook, it asks something about what do you want to do?

[00:18:26] And at the time I want it to be a graphic novel writer. And that is in my yearbook. So I would just create characters, write backstories for them. And that's what I would do on my phone to pass the time is what I thought was fun. So when I moved to Delaware and parted ways with the band, I needed something to occupy my time and I did not want to dive back into music.

[00:18:45] I had done it for too long. I didn't want to start over. I ended up just writing short stories again on my phone for fun. And my wife had actually read one of them and she was like, how come you never release anything? Like, how come you just sit here and write in the notes section of your phone and then delete it.

[00:18:59] And I was like, I don't know. I don't think I have anything people want to read. I worked on something and she read the first draft of it and was like, I really like this. Like, you should just try and get this published. And I was like, I don't think people are going to like it, but okay. And then it got published.

[00:19:13] And then all of a sudden I have my mother, my friends, my family, who were like, you know, I like this. I don't understand why you didn't do this sooner. And I'm like, I, I don't know. You probably wouldn't like what I wrote in high school.

[00:19:23] And so this is actually the take home, this upcoming little statement that Nick makes for me during this interview. And this is why I opened this episode with that question of, are you willing to release something bad or at least release something that requires some refinement and requires some work in order for you to get better?

[00:19:45] My biggest piece of advice, would first, I guess we'll start with one. Right. Even if it's bad, even if you just have a story in mind and you're like, I'm not going to put these words together properly, and people are not going to like this Cause that's where I was at. Write. And then just send it in. Have faith in yourself, send it in and trust me, trust me When I say the publishers are going to tell you when it's bad I've had a lot of publishers. I've had my own publishers tell me it's bad. And that's just part of the process is how you get better. And I've said this in the beginning, but I feel like every time I write something new, it gets better.

[00:20:24] And for new writers, that's going to be the case. The first thing you put out there might not even get published. And then you have to really look at the feedback you got and say.

[00:20:31] Okay. They didn't like it for these reasons. Is it the story? Is it me? Is it something I need to change? But at the same time, you want to maintain your own voice and you're not going to please everybody.

[00:20:42] And eventually you'll get good enough. And eventually the right publisher will come along, have faith in your project and really carry you through the way. And second piece of advice, listen to your publishers. If you're going that route, if you're going self published Listen to your beta readers and listen to the editors that you bring on.

[00:20:58] But if you're going a traditional or an indie publisher route, listen to them. Because most of the time, 99% of the time from my experience so far, they want what's best for your book without removing the parts of the book that make it yours. So definitely just write whatever you can send it in. They're going to tell you it sucks and then listen to them when they tell you it sucks.

[00:21:22] And that is the biggest lesson with developing any form of talent, just like learning to play the piano or learning to play a musical instrument or learning how to paint or draw or whatever. It may be different skills that you have at work. So wing. I don't know. All of these things are talents and talents require practice and paying attention to feedback.

[00:21:49] And so that means that sometimes you get to be brave and you get to write something that may not be great. And you get to give it to a few trusted people in order for them to find the holes in it that you don't see. And in order for them to pick apart some of the clunky things and to offer some guidance and some advice.

[00:22:10] So that, that bit of work can be even better than it was when it, when you began it. And so that is the take home from me to you. If you are looking to seriously get into writing, and it's not something that you do all the time, just start, write anything and then give it to somebody to critique.

[00:22:34] The feedback is the most important lessons. With writing so that you can get better hearing how your work can improve is a very vulnerable space to be in. But it, like I said, it is the biggest lesson on how to do it better and on how to make that specific piece better. So that is it for today. If you are interested in reading Order of Dust or The Ones Who Can Do Anything, go ahead and follow the link in the show notes and you will be able to check those out. 

[00:23:09] Otherwise, thank you so much to my patrons who donate to this show every month without your generous donations, the show could not be possible. Go ahead and follow me on social media. My Instagram handle is @authordevindavis and my Twitter handle is @authordevind. Thank you so much for listening and have fun writing.

[00:23:33] 

Check out this episode!

#writing #writer #author #fiction #am writing #wip

[thegeekyzoologist]

My opinion on Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (SPOILERS)

Like many people interested in the Jurassic franchise, I binge-watched that show back in september and here are my thoughts.  First of all, I precise that I had no expectations for the series as the combo Jurassic World + kid show didn’t attracted me at all, and the trailers have done nothing but confirm my fears.

Let’s start by the positive: - Amidst the cringefest that the first episodes were, the scenes with Darius back home stand out from the rest by their quality as they are centred more on drama and character development and not on clumsy comedy like the scenes on Nublar. The idea of getting an access to Jurassic World and Camp Cretaceous as a reward for beating that virtual reality game reminded me the recruitment of Eli Wallace by the SGC at the very beginning of Stargate Universe. - Starting from the beginning of the season’s second half, the series gets better and a little more mature in its unfolding and writing, up to the point where it doesn’t seem targeted for young children but rather young teens. Some dumb scenes remain however (like the one of the geneticist Eddie, abandoned in the lab with the sole company of his birthday cake). - There is a few action and suspenseful scenes that aren’t bad in the second half with, among other things, a hide-and-seek game with the Indominus amidst the containers, a part in the tunnels that can remind some people of Telltale’s game, a monorail attack by the pteranodons which should have deserved a live-action treatment, and a climax in a storage area where the protagonists have to use their wits in order to defeat the carnotaur and escape from the underground network. On the matter of the carnotaur, one can note a nice paleontological reference with its difficulty to turn when it is chasing prey. - Of all of the characters, Roxie is the most realistic, responsible and reasonable one (and the only tolerable one in the first episodes). And let’s bring now the negative aspects: - On the matter of the original soundtrack, I don’t remember any of the original themes sadly. As I had the same problem when I viewed The Witcher though (I didn’t liked its first season but I rather well appreciated its soundtrack following a separated listening), I will wait for the release of the soundtrack before criticizing it further. - The first episodes are a total farce with a succession of all kinds of nonsenses with the bunch of stereotypical buffoons that the kids are that are involved in stupid acts by the night of their first day, acts that fall under Reversed Darwinism (the survival of the most idiotic like Grant would say in Jurassic Park 3) and that gave me the desire to give some slaps and send those Kennys to a firing squad (for the crimes of property destruction and, above all, endangering dinosaurs and employees); the infringements during the activities of hygiene and security rules that are applied in many theme parks and laboratories around the world (with the kids wandering around in the lab and touching to everything in a total dissidence; running down a zipline and brushing past brachiosaurs...); the counsellor Dave which talks to Wu like if he was an old pal of his while Wu is one of the highest corporate executive around and someone famous and respected in-universe; Wu being depicted with the subtlety of a fat beer-drunk sea lion (with his mannerisms and attitude worthy of a James Bond villain, we know right away that he is bad); cartoony action scenes (I mean bloody hell. Look at that Parasaurolophus that jumps off the jeep’s roof like he was a fookin’ kangaroo while the jeep itself wasn’t miraculously crushed under the hadrosaur’s weight); the employees and the park’s security being shitty (one enter so easily in the underground network that Biosyn could organise rave parties there right under InGen’s nose; Darius and Kenji being left with no supervision in the middle of the jungle while they are supposed to shovel shit as a punishment); the dinosaurs that passes too as incompetent for failing to kill the kids while such situations in real-life or in the first films would have unforgiving or barely forgiving but only at a certain cost. - Despite the ordeals they are going through, the kids seems to be never traumatised or at least shaken like the Murphys, Kelly Malcolm or Maisie were respectively in JP, TLW and FK since here, they seems to be in shock for a moment or two before starting again to squabble or quipping once they are away from danger. - At the end of the monorail attack scene, I thought that the writers had the balls to kill off Ben  and I would have tipped my hat to this narrative decision and give more credit to this kid show if we didn’t had the reveal at the end that he was still alive. At the end, we just got another Billy Brennan situation. - Bumby is useless in this season, aside from encouraging toy sales and being the show’s cute caution and still, it’s relative as her closeups along with Brooklynn’s rapy face in episode 2 have scared me more than the predators’ attacks in the season’s second half. And her growth rate is so fucked up as she hatch in episode 2 before reappearing in episode 5 I think which is supposed to be set two days later, where she is already the size of a bulldog. And the scene where she cries while the kids are being kicked off the lab (for understandable reasons) is so ridiculous... - Aside from in the action and suspenseful scenes mentioned above in the positive aspects, the use and depicting of dinosaurs is either anecdotal, either WTF with the Sinoceratops being almost as gentle as a lamb (try to do with a hippo or a rhino what the Kennys did with the sino, I wouldn’t mind some funny antics...). I’m not a fan of the bioluminescent Parasaurolophus and their scene either. It seems like they wanted to copy the Na’vi River Journey’s attraction from Animal Kingdom in Orlando, with semi-aquatic parasaurs worthy of some outdated depictions from the last century.   - Visually speaking, the universe and the artistic direction are poor. The jungle has the same look everywhere on the island (with trees of average height being relatively spaced from one another while the ground is covered with grass) and its scenery never seem foreboding or ominous while Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna were, in some way, entire characters in the films that sometimes aroused an eerie sense of mystery and danger, at east in the original trilogy and Fallen Kingdom. The park itself is quite empty too, even before the evacuation. There is only scene with a large amount of people and the latter seems to all share the same model and the same animation in addition of being blurred (probably as a camouflage for the lack of budget) and we don’t believe in this world as nothing grand comes out of the visited locations (aside from maybe the eponymous Camp Cretaceous) and that everything seems so bland, with even the employees being of the same corpulence, age group and behaviour except for a few exceptions. - Finally, let’s discuss about the coherence with the Jurassic World film, of which this show is supposed be a canon interquel. Even though if there is several nods to some of the latter’s events (Masrani’s helicopter is seen a couple of times; the Kennys take the ACU’s van; they walk past Zach and Gray’s destroyed gyrosphere and the killed ankylosaur’s body...)  as well as other materials of the franchise, including JP3 and Masrani Global website, like if the show wanted to tell us “Hey look! I did my homework!” in order to please the fans. It’s one thing to make references to the rest of the saga and it’s easy actually, but it’s another to use them for something else than just fan-service. Despite all this, Camp Cretaceous has its share of inconsistencies with Jurassic World. I won’t list them all since it wouldn’t be that interesting but among other things, we have the mention of fences falling apart across the entire island while nothing like this happened in JW (it seems they mixed up the JP and JW incidents) or at least not on this scale; the kids visit a lab somewhere north of the park whose existence seems a bit off as the Innovation Center’s lab can do everything that lab does, in addition of housing Wu’s secret lab; the surroundings of the mosasaur lagoon which seems empty by the end of the afternoon while chronologically speaking, the scene is supposed to happen just after the pterosaurs attack (and thus the area should be crawling with employees that are looking for eventual late visitors, or the still running security cameras could have spotted the kids) and why did those foolish Kennys didn’t thought of going to the nearby hotels right after the ordeal with the mosasaur instead of hanging around in the bleachers up until sunset, hotels where a large number of visitors are supposed to be found up until quite late in the night according to the Jurassic World film? Anyway, Camp Cretaceous might have got a kick up the backside halfway through and the quality of the episodes did increased little by little but the whole season stays nevertheless mediocre and the viewing of the series is honestly quite dispensable, especially if you were disappointed by the Jurassic World films. Some will probably tell me that I’m being too hard with a kids show but actually, the fact that it is targeted for kids is no excuse for some flaws like a lack of ambition in the artistic direction, the shitty humour or the wtf scenes. Whether a work is for adults, for all audiences, or for kids, the creative investment and the work quality should stay the same.

#jurassic #jurassicworld #jurassic park #jurassic world camp cretaceous #camp cretaceous

[ihearthorror]

My Top 10 Favourite Horror Films of 2020

Every January, most people who review or talk about movies on YouTube tend to piece together a Top 10 list of their favourite movies from the year prior. In order to stand out from the crowd (and also because I was too lazy to do this sooner), I decided to wait until March, by which time most YouTubers aren’t really talking about movies from 2020 anymore.

I know what you’re thinking: sounds kinda stupid – why would anybody care about a Top 10 list of the best movies of 2020…THREE months into the new year!? Well, as you’ve likely heard, 2020 was a year like no other, and as result of the ongoing global pandemic, movie release dates from 2020 were pushed back months, sometimes multiple times. Some films that were supposed to be released last year didn’t arrive until 2021, even though they’re officially considered “2020 films,” according to their profiles on websites like IMBD and Letterboxd.

And so, some of these so-called “2020 films” were not available (at least to me) until only recently, such as Saint Maud or The Dark and the Wicked. I feel like I’ve now had a chance to see almost all of the horror films I’ve wanted to see from last year. In this video, if you care to stick around, I will share with you my Top 10 favourite horror films of 2020. So, here we go…

#10/ The Dark and the Wicked:

A sister and brother return to the family homestead where their father is slowly dying and their mother is understandably distraught but also disturbed and distant. The siblings soon realize that something evil has invaded their family home as they are terrorized by whatever is slowly killing their father. Directed by the same guy behind 2008’s The Strangers, The Dark and the Wicked is at times bleak and unsettling, and it does a good job at keeping you intrigued in this family’s unnerving conflict. However, it felt a bit rushed and undeveloped at other times, and its ending left me somewhat unsatisfied.

#9/ Relic:

Soon after Kay and her daughter Sam return to their remote family home following the disappearance of the family matriarch, the widowed Edna, they discover that something sinister has taken hold of both Edna and the house itself. Although Relic – which was co-produced by Jake Gyllenhaal and marked the feature directorial debut for Natalie Erika James – isn’t exactly offering up any enticing twists or salacious gore, or even a original concept for that matter, it relies on evoking dread and building tension to compel its audience to stay invested until the bitter end.

#8/ Amulet:

Taking its sweet time to unravel, Amulet is centered around Tomaz, an ex-soldier who is now homeless but is offered a place to stay at a decaying house in London, which is inhabited by a beautiful young woman named Magda and her dying mother. As the story moves along, we see that Tomaz is starting to develop feelings for Magda, who seems a bit…off. His feelings for her don’t wane even after Tomaz discovers that there’s something insidious going on in the attic of the house, where Magda’s mother is seemingly imprisoned. Toss in a suspicious nun and you’ve got yourself a creepy little film that seems to have fallen between the cracks.

#7/ The Beach House:

One might argue that not a lot actually happens in The Beach House and that the payoff isn’t worth the investment, but if you go into this film with an open mind and zero expectations, you should at least be satisfied. Two troubled college students head to a deserted beach getaway to spend some time together, but end up struggling to survive alongside some unexpected guests as a mysterious infection disrupts their holiday. Although it is a slow build up to the film’s climax, it is a tense and intriguing ride along the way, as a series of unsettling events give way to an apocalyptic episode that feels almost like a throwback to the sci-fi films of the 1950s. Making his feature film directorial debut, Jeffrey A. Brown elicits with The Beach House those brooding existential thoughts that lay dormant in the deep boroughs of our minds. 

#6/ The Invisible Man:

There’s always an elevated risk when making a modern film based on an old story that has already been told through cinema numerous times before. The last time H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel The Invisible Man had been adapted by Hollywood was in 2000’s Hollow Man, which was panned by critics despite making a sizeable profit. The 2020 adaptation is far superior and is perhaps the best adaptation of Wells’ classic in any medium. Elizabeth Moss gives a stellar performance that draws real emotion, so that we agonize alongside her as she is essentially haunted by a relentless ghost hellbent on controlling every aspect of her life. We live in an era when technology has advanced enough to bring this 124-year-old story to life like never before, while a polished script and an exceptional lead performance gives The Invisible Man a deeper level of emotion and terror.

#5/ Saint Maud:

For most of Saint Maud it is unclear whether certain experiences are actually happening in reality for the main character or if it’s all simply in her head, as some sort of mental breakdown caused by a work-related tragedy. Maud is a young hospice nurse and a newly-converted Roman Catholic who suddenly becomes obsessed with “saving the soul” of the woman she is currently taking care of, Amanda, a hedonistic dancer with a chronic illness. Maud’s behaviour worsens, as does her mental state, as horrific scenes and visions make us question if she’s actually losing her mind or experiencing something beyond this world. Saint Maud is an A24 feature by the way, so that should be enough to know what you’re getting here in terms of quality.

#4/ The Lodge:

Isolation is often embraced as a way to pad a horror film’s fear factor, and it works especially here in The Lodge, as a soon-to-be stepmom becomes stranded at a remote holiday home in the middle of winter with her fiance’s two children. The kids begin to untangle the dark past of their stepmom-to-be and a series of disturbing events transpire as their hope for survival fades. The Lodge is a dreary, atmospheric slow burn that leaves you somewhat unsettled. With its wintry backdrop, stylish sequences, and almost claustrophobic dread, the film doesn’t ever allow its audience to feel at ease for long, insisting that an underlying foreboding remain intact throughout. Although I found the ending somewhat disappointing, I immediately began to concoct a possible prequel that would delve into the backstory of the film’s lead character. One can hope.

#3/ Host:

It’s increasingly difficult to be innovative and original when it comes to horror films these days, especially in the particular genre of so-called “found footage.” Rob Savage’s Host, however, comes off as something different, setting itself apart from most films in this realm in various ways. It centers around six friends who hold a séance via Zoom during a COVID lockdown, guided (at first) by a medium they hired. The séance then takes a dark turn and things soon escalate into madness. Sure, there are elements in Host that are prevalent in numerous horror films, but it uses a modern and topical way to implement them, while also refusing to overstay its welcome by cueing the credits less than an hour in. Overall, this film’s popcorn-and-Saturday-night-movie fun factor is why it ranks so high on this list.

#2/ Possessor:

It’s always a treat to come across an original idea, especially when it’s within the horror realm, and Possessor is certainly unlike anything else I’ve seen in awhile. Andrea Riseborough plays an elite corporate assassin who uses brain-implant technology to take control over other people’s bodies in order to kill high profile targets, though with every mission she gets further and further away from her true self. With her latest possession, she becomes trapped in the mind of a man who threatens to obliterate her for good. It is a provocative vision by director-writer Brandon Cronenberg, who just so happens to be the son of legendary Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, and it serves as a disturbing piece of dystopian fiction that is even more frightening because it isn’t too far beyond belief.

And because everyone else is doing it, here are five honorable mentions that narrowly missed the list:

- The Call

- Color Out of Space

- Don’t Listen

- The Mortuary Collection

- Porno

#1/ His House:

In addition to its emotional storytelling and genuine moments of terror, His House – from first-time director Remi Weekes – sheds a light on the plight of refugees in a way that feels both respectful and empathetic. After a Sudanese couple make a harrowing escape from their war-torn homeland, they are granted asylum in England, where they struggle to adjust and fit in. They are assigned a shabby house on the outskirts of London, where the couple begin to experience terrifying and unexplainable events. His House is built around a fresh concept, two fantastic leads, and some truly haunting imagery, and I wish that more horror directors would put as much effort into quality filmmaking as Weekes did here. If this is his first venture into feature filmmaking, I am excited to see what his future has in store. 

There you have it, my Top 10 favourite horror films of 2020. What did you think and were any of these titles on your own Top 10 list? Please tell me your thoughts and recommendations in the comments below.

#ihearthorror moviereviews horrormovies Top10horror bestof2020 horrormovies2020 bestofhorror2020

[westudiedfilmfor3years]

Our First Episode: The Bechdel Test and its Various Offspring

Maddy: Hello and welcome to our podcast, "We Studied Film For Three Years And All We Got Was This Podcast". I'm one of your hosts, Maddy Raven. I'm a third-year theatre and film student.

Jemima: I'm Jemima. I'm also a third year, but just straight film student.

Sarah: And I'm Sarah. And I'm also studying film and television.

Maddy: So this podcast is going to be about film criticism, specifically focusing on diversifying female voices in film criticism, because we think that there are a lot of male, straight white voices in film criticism. Shout out to Michael, who is a straight white male editor.

Maddy: He's looking from side to side!

Jemima: We love Michael.

Maddy: And we're putting this together partly as part of our assessment. So this will be assessed, but also because we want to talk about films and we like to talk about films and we have super interesting conversations about them.

Maddy: And we want to share them with the world because frankly, my opinions are fantastic, actually. And I'm going to force them on everyone else.

Jemima: Yeah, our opinions matter. And because we've kind of done three years of this, I think that we can all agree we have a kind of educated response to films that we just want to put across and create a dialogue about.

Jemima: But at the same time, we want to keep it informal. We want every person, people that don't watch films often know nothing about the theory of it,  and then the people who have also studied it as well. We just want to make it fun, accessible and yeah, hope you enjoy it.

Maddy: We'll also be having guests on the show, hopefully including, you know, like friends, even family, I'll get my dad to come on and rant about how much he loves Jeff Bridges. My dad is like a massive crush on Jeff Bridges. And he's like, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm sure I'm straight.

Maddy: It's like, you are gay for Jeff Bridges, like so gay for Jeff Bridges, it's ridiculous.

Maddy: But having people on to talk to people from the film industry as well and hopefully talk about various things to do with the industry as well, because as everyone knows, it is really difficult to get into the film industry and hopefully at least one of us will somehow make it there and we will be able to share knowledge.

Jemima: Yeah, let's hope all of us, but at least one that would be great.

Maddy: There's four of us, one in four should make it. Yeah.

Jemima: Twenty-five percent. That's fine. 

Maddy: So each episode will be about like a topic. We like topics. It's a general topic and we're going to start out. Oh my God, my text has disappeared from my notes. That's terrifying.

Maddy: So we just thought we'd start out pretty gentle and start by talking about the Bechdel test, which since it came out as part of Allison Bechdel's comic, which came out I think was in the 70s when I can't find it in my notes. 

Sarah: I think that one was from nineteen eighty-five.

Maddy: Nineteen eighty five. Thank you Sarah.

Maddy: Since then it has become, you know, this huge thing it has come so far since then, and there's even a website where you can go and search up your favourite films and we'll be talking about some of our favourite films and why they passed the test and why they don't and how we feel about that and also why the Bechdel Test exists, in our opinion. So, um, Sarah, do you mind giving us a little rundown of what the Bechdel Test is? Because you sound super knowledgeable and smart.

Sarah: Thank you. Sure. So it's called the Bechdel-Wallace Test, it originates from a comic strip called The Rule by Allison Bechdel from 1985, part of her comic called Dykes to Watch Out For.

Sarah: Yeah, lesbians to watch out for lesbians, lesbians substituting a word that can be considered a slur.

Sarah: And yeah, basically these two characters in the comic strip, they're walking past the cinema, I think, talking about movies. And one of them says how they only go to see a film if it passes three simple rules. 

Sarah: So it needs to have at least two female characters who talk to each other about something other than men.

Sarah: And I think since then, people have added that the female characters need to have names, so, yeah, it started off as just a kind of tongue in cheek little joke about how few films actually do have something really simple, like two women in them. And I think, yeah, Alison Bechdel said this is inspired by a conversation she had with her friend Liz Wallace, which is why sometimes it's called the Bechdel-Wallace test. But since then, yeah, critics have kind of rolled it and made a more official kind of way to look at films.

Maddy: Yeah, yeah, that's it. So have any of you seen Pacific Rim?

Jemima: Yeah, wait, there's more to say about that.

Jemima: There's the whole Virginia Woolf thing. OK, so also another thing is that Alison Bechdel, she prefers it to be called the Bechdel-Wallace test just because they created it together and she got most of the credit. That's one thing to say. And then the Virginia Woolf thing, she read A Room of One's Own and thought that was a great way of just kind of encouraging the feminist writings to be transferred onto film.

Jemima: So this test should be really easy to just apply. Another thing as well: there's an additional, Sarah, you said the named character one. The other one is a total of more than 60 seconds of conversation. That's another important one.

Maddy: So what is A Room of One's Own, because I've not actually read the book. So when you say the Virginia Woolf thing, what do you mean?

Jemima: So it's a nineteen twenty-nine essay.

Jemima: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of my fictitious woman, utterly simple. And I try to remember any case in that course of my readings where two women are represented as friends. They are now and then mothers and daughters are almost without exception, they are shown in relation to men.

Jemima: It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that?

Maddy: Oh, that's quite pretty, actually. Maybe I should read that, I'll say that, but I won't read it for years to come because I'm bad at concentrating,

Sarah: You can borrow it if you'd like.

Maddy: Yeah, I would. Genuinely, I wish I could read, but I'm probably sitting down and doing it. So obviously, the Bechdel test is a pretty simple test. It has been elaborated on slightly, but I've read a lot of articles about this and in particular, people notice that certain films were passing the test, while other films were failing them. There was such a disparity, like it said here, like Pacific Rim fails the Bechdel Test, despite having like this badass woman, called Mako Mori, she's a Japanese fighter like she because she kicks this guy's ass like ten minutes into the film. It's amazing because the film fails the test essentially and somehow, Thor passes it.

Maddy: So, you know, people are wondering how do we- how do we remedy this? So a Tumblr user called Chila invented the Mako Mori test after watching Pacific Rim. And you will pass this test if you have one female character who gets her own narrative arc that is not supporting a man's story. So moving on from, they have the bare minimum, which is like two female characters talking about, you know, something other than a man to each other: it's also at least one of these women getting a narrative arc and getting to live her own life. And it's not because of a guy, basically.

Maddy: And then Roxane Gay, who is fantastic, you should follow her on Instagram, we love her. She proposed this six-part test. And it says, is there a central female character who is supporting female characters, who doesn't compromise herself for love or live extravagantly for no explained reason? And at least half the time is this character, a woman of colour, transgender and/or queer?

Maddy: And there's also a sixth point, which is a requirement, which is the suggestion that female characters shouldn't have to live up to an unrealistic feminist standard. They can be flawed so long as they feel like they're human beings because, you know, like women, in order to win a place in film a lot of time, it's almost as if women have to be on their best behaviour. They have to be really good. And that's something I'm particularly interested in. I'm really interested in women that are horrible people. I am obsessed with Gone Girl. It's a little bit of a problem. But the Cool Girl Monologue, it changed my life. I know everyone says that everyone, everyone on Twitter was just like the Cool Girl Monologue created so many monsters. And yes, it should have done because I love it. I love women who are horrible. And I think we should allow women to be horrible in films as well. And I think we should allow them to be angry and cry. And just off the top of my head, just like I've seen so many amazing, like montages like this, especially like I tried to with my social media feeds, with a lot of like women that are talking about film and just watching female rage on screen can be so exciting sometimes. Like, um, have any of you watch Lovecraft Country yet? 

Jemima: Yeah, I have.

Maddy: When she smashes the car windows with the baseball bat.

Jemima: Yeah. Yeah. And then everyone's like, oh, I can smash windows too. Yeah.

Maddy: And there's also like well - what were some other examples I was thinking about? Ready or Not. We studied that a couple of weeks ago with Peter Falconer in our Contemporary Hollywood cinema unit. She's just screaming at her husband. She's so angry she doesn't even have words anymore. She just starts yelling. And I'm like, yes, you know, I love that. I've got away from myself. Yeah. I just love women who are horrible people, and I think that should be more of them. Yeah.

Jemima: And Carrie is an awesome one to do female rage about. Of course, she's a flawed, flawed character, but we have compassion for Carrie. We understand her because she has depth to her.

Jemima: And that's all we want, female characters with depth, motivation. We can determine throughout the film, not just prancing off to a man.

Maddy: So then the next test after that was the Sexy Lamp Test, which was made by Kelly Sue DeConnick. I love the name: Sexy Lamp Test. It's quite easy to pass. You pass it if your female character, it could be replaced by a sexy lamp without the plot falling apart. You're a fucking hack. So, yeah, I'm thinking back to maybe, X-Men First Class where that woman who like turns to diamond half the time follows - is it Kevin Bacon? I think it is Kevin Bacon. It's like she's one of the baddies, I swear, because, like, all she does is just be hot, have boobs and turn to diamonds sometimes. I fully believe, like, she could literally turn into a sexy lamp at any point through the film and nothing would change.

Jemima: Like, I mean, her turning into diamonds is kind of commenting on that itself, she's nothing but a mere object of desire in that way.

Maddy: And just talking about like, yeah, if she could literally be replaced by a lamp and the plot wouldn't change. You've got an issue with your female character. And then when you put all these tests together, it's been put together and formed the Crystal Gems test. So it's named after the heroes in Steven Universe, which I still haven't watched and still need to watch Steven Universe.

Maddy: And it creates this big triangle. And you just kind of you can mark whether or not it passes the tests and it creates a cute little graph. And there's also other stuff like the Ellen Willis test, so that requires the story to make sense if the genders were flipped. So I'm thinking about Overboard! Have any of you seen Overboard?

Jemima: The new one?

Maddy: Yeah, I'm thinking about the fact that they swap the genders for the new version like it's problematic both ways. Just for context, Overboard, is it Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn? Yeah, so she's like this rich woman living on a boat and he's like a workman on the boat. And I think they get into that argument because she's a dick and he pushes her off the boat - I don't know, she falls off the boat. She gets amnesia and then he's somehow got a load of kids. His wife is dead or something, I think. And he's got loads of kids. And so instead of like a normal human being, when he finds that she has amnesia, she goes to the police station and she doesn't know where she is, who she is, instead of being like a normal non-psychotic human being and just leaving her on her own, after he's basically- actually I don't think he pushes her off the boat. He takes her home and tells her that she's his wife and makes her help him raise the kids. I think it's supposed to be this comment about like teaching her humility and teaching her to be a good person. But it's not that. It is kidnap. 

Jemima: It's like 50 First Dates. I had a real, real big problem with the fact that she could not consent to any of the dates. She was vulnerable. She had a disability. She was basically being forced to, like, fall in love with Adam Sandler. And great, cute I understand the rom-com assets of that, but at the same time, like you do not know this person. She wakes up every day. Like just because you've invested so much in her does not mean she should be forced to hang out with you every hour of the day and love you.

Jemima: You know, it's just a bit crazy.

Maddy: So, then they obviously remade Overboard, but they were like, oh, instead of, like, remaking it - obviously people would have had an issue with it if they'd remade it today with the same role models, everyone would've refused. Actually not everyone, sane human people would have been like, this is fucked up. You can't just kidnap women and tell them that your wife because they've got amnesia. But like, they decided to swap the gender roles as if that made it better. So this is Chris Pratt's ex-wife. 

Jemima: You just called her Chris Pratt's ex-wife!

Maddy: I did! Because I've been thinking about him a lot and the fact that he's a conservative and he's like a horrible, homophobic Christian.

Jemima: Allegedly.

Maddy: Allegedly, allegedly. Allegedly. Oh, no. I'm already getting sued.

Maddy: But yeah, I was just thinking about - it's still messed up, even if it's a girl kidnapping a guy, it's still messed up. But then in that way, I guess it does pass the Ellen Willis test.

Sarah: It's an awful idea.

Maddy: And in the last one, the last test I really do like is called the Tauriel, the one the Evangeline Lily plays in the altogether too long Hobbit franchise. The one who falls in love with Aidan Turner. 

Maddy: Anyway, it's a test that says that if there's going to be a woman in the film where she works a job the same as a load of guys, she has to be good at what she does. At least one woman has to be good at her job because they never have jobs. It's always like, you're a housewife. That's your job.

Jemima: You're a mother and a wife first and that is your job.

Maddy: Exactly, like if there's going to be a woman, she's going to have a job and she's going to be good at that job. Just one, the rest can be terrible. Just one. Just one of them has to be a smart human being who is capable.

Maddy: That's all we want.

Jemima: Practical skills. I don't know her.

Maddy: Yes, exactly.

Michael: I've had to not interject like three times. The sexy lady from X-Men is called Emma Frost. And turning into diamond is her secondary mutation. And they've just they've just really badly represented the character on film. I'll defend her.

Jemima: When I was like 15, I read this autobiography by one of the world's most famous groupies from the 60s and 70s. Reread it the other day. And it's the most horrendous anti-feminist paedophilic disgustingness I have ever read. I don't know. It's like glamorising everything. And of course, it was a sign of the times. But like even in her, like, epilogue, she was just like, I excuse myself and my behaviour, it's all fine and it's like, no.

Jemima: So I guess it just takes a twenty-first century perspective on things, isn't it? To reflect, hopefully.

Maddy: Yeah, so I guess. Oh, there are so many more tests I could go into if you guys are up for that

Jemima: Do you reckon we should start doing the film stuff? 

Maddy: Yeah, I would like to mention, though, just to make it clear that I'm not a terrible person. There are also lots of tests. So the Deggans rule requires a show that's not about race to include at least two non-white human characters in the main cast.

Maddy: The Morales Rule by actor Natalie Morales, asks that no one calls anybody papi, dances to salsa music, or uses gratuitous Spanish if they're a latinx character.

Maddy: And one of my personal favourites is the DuVernay test, or sometimes referred to as the Kent test, after Clarkisha Kent. She's an interesting film critic. A piece of work passes it if African-Americans and other minorities have fully realised lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories. That makes me think back to The Help, you know, Viola Davis. She's been saying, I regret being part of that film, but a lot of the time it is about making sure that you're not just including women and giving them a seat at the table, but making sure that people of colour and people who are queer as well because there's also - I'm not how to say this, I'm probably going to butcher it, the Vito-Russo test.

Maddy: There are three requirements to pass this test. The film must contain a lesbian, gay or bisexual or transgender character. That character must not be predominantly defined by the orientation or their gender identity. They need to be as unique as straight cis characters, and they must be important enough to affect the plot. They can't just crack some jokes or paint urban authenticity.

Maddy: There's also the Topside test for trans literature and there are plenty of other tests like the Finkbeiner Test for non-fiction and the Lauredhel test for toys. So there's loads of tests. The Bechdel test started quite a few movements in film, and it's all very interesting. So I think next we're going to be looking at some of our favourite films and seeing whether or not they pass the test.

Maddy: And you are welcome to judge us and our favourite films, as I'm sure you will. And I'm sure we'll judge each other. 

Jemima: Please do. 

Maddy: I think Jemima should go first. 

Jemima: Well, I have a few that I can pick from. I think a good one to start would be - have any of you guys in Starship Troopers? OK, so any one of us, which is Michael and he doesn't even speak a lot, so we'll get him to speak - unmute yourself at this point.

Jemima: OK, I'm going to quiz you on it. Do you think it's a feminist film?

Michael: Isn't like - they're fighting bugs, right? Yeah, isn't like the main enemy, like the queen bug.

Jemima: OK, I'm talking about interpersonal, human relationships.

Michael: Yeah, I think there's only two female characters and they're both trying to, like, vie for the attention of one male character. If I remember.

Michael: Is that right?

Jemima: But what is it? What I find to be really interesting about the film is that, basically, the protagonist, male, heterosexual character, he goes into the army because his girlfriend encourages it, she's in the army, he's like, I don't know what to do. I'm going to follow Carmen to the army.

Jemima: And that is a switch from tradition - it's gender play, which I enjoy. And also the other female character, called Izzy, who also enters the army. But her motivation is to get the protagonist because she fancies him. But they met because they both played American football together on the same team. And it's a Paul Verhoeven film. Paul Verhoeven works a lot with eroticism. So you can see the kind of anti-feminist stuff from sexualising women, but at the same time. 

Michael: Is it Showgirls?

Jemima: Yeah, the same time he's giving female voices power and narrative arcs and all this stuff. And I really enjoy it. And I think when I was a kid, some of my favourite films like Starship Troopers, Aliens, all of that stuff, I really enjoy strong female protagonists. And I think he got somewhere with it, although there's a lot of tits and ass. But you got somewhere. 

Jemima: I don't even know - this is just talking to you guys. But I don't even know if it's good to talk about film if we haven't watched it or whatever, because it's hard because you guys haven't got much to comment on those two.

Maddy: Interesting comment.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, we can cut it out later if it doesn't work, but like you have some interesting stuff say so like. Go ahead.

Jemima: Thank you. I'll just do a bit on the Bechdel test. So the movie does have at least two women in it, surprisingly, only two though. Some of the other women are nameless characters like you do have women captains, all of that stuff. But yeah, I think the point of having women able to do like military stuff, at a time when women couldn't even do that in the 90s. So I appreciate that. And I think it's much better than our world at that point. So that's a good point. And then they don't talk to each other. That's one that interests me. They only talk in relation to the guy. I think - I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but one of the females dies halfway through, so they can't really talk to each other. Plus, it's all narratives in different parts of space and time and super difficult. Three: about something other than a man. Well, obviously, that's not applicable because they don't talk to each other. And when they do discuss it, it's all about men. And then two additional points that we could make is: two women must be named characters, they are called Carmen and Dizzy, so that's yes and/or they must have at least a total of 60 seconds of conversation. If I was to manipulate this, I would say at least 60 seconds of action, because they're both strong, physically strong women in the film. And you see that throughout. Carmen, at the end, she's like there, fully, with this giant bug and all the men and all the army surrounding her, but she keeps her cool and she survives an awful lot and she does it all by herself.

Jemima: So I think that's a good point. Yeah, that's me done.

Maddy: How about Sarah next?

Sarah: So one of my favourite movies is Lady Bird, have we we all seen that one?

Jemima: Yes.

Sarah: So, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, films that are written and directed by women, well, more likely than films written and directed by men, it seems, Lady Bird does pass all of the features of the Bechdel test because when women write, we know that we have lives and we speak to women. And that's a normal thing that would happen in, you know, a character's life.

Sarah: Yeah, we've got several named female characters who are friends who have conversations about various things. They do talk about men now and then. But like that isn't their only interest in life.

Sarah: I think that Lady Bird's like a pretty good bit of female representation, I mean, the characters are quite well rounded, the main character, Lady Bird, but she's a likeable character that lot of people, you know, relate to in some way, but she isn't, like, flawless, she's quite emotional, but not in a sort of derogatory hysterical kind of way - in a kind of stereotyped fashion.

Maddy: Yeah, I was just thinking I've just been thinking about the fact that we've also been looking at Little Women, which is obviously also directed by Greta Gerwig, this term as once again, as part of our Hollywood unit. And I was thinking about, you know, the moment not that not the proposal moment, but the bit where Joe is in the attic with her mom and she's talking about, you know, her life.

Maddy: And she goes women. They have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition and they've got talent as well as just beauty. I'm so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for. And I think Greta Gerwig does that very well. I mean, it's the same actress both times. It's Saoirse Ronan and I think they're a very good duo.

Maddy: And I think you're right. You know, female directors and female writers, they are women, they talk to other women a lot of the time, hopefully. And they are aware of the fact that, you know, I can't believe I have to say this, but we have complex inner lives. We have thoughts and stuff.

Maddy: I have many opinions, like I've said, and we deserve to have them represented on screen.

Maddy: And I think for Greta Gerwig, despite the overwhelming whiteness of a lot of the people that she casts in her films, she does a very good job of showing, you know, a particular type of female character.

Maddy: And she's very good at teenage girls as well, I think. Yeah, very good at that age group. And she clearly remembers her own adolescence quite well. And she does a very good job of just kind of like, talking about that kind of stuff. I don't know. I rate her for it, I think it's pretty cool.

Jemima: Yeah. I think one of the great things about Greta is the fact that she has completely found a niche in the market. How many times have like we heard about a mother-daughter film? Not a lot like - can we think of any right now?

Maddy: Still Alice, I think is it called?

Jemima: Yeah, that's one.

Maddy: I guess, is My Sister's Keeper a mother-daughter film?

Jemima: We do not talk about that film. *inaudible giggling*

Jemima: Yeah, so Greta really works with the kind of bringing - fleshing out people, not just women, people, and then bringing the interplay between them into question. Just flawed characters - we all have- like, we still love each other. We all make mistakes. And her films really brilliantly portray that. And growing up is also like coming of age films, heart-wrenching. And I really enjoy the fact that, like at the end of the film, I feel like men, women, children, anyone can get something out of Lady Bird, get something out of Little Women.

Jemima: But one additional point is that Little Women, the text of it, she is like the film is- it basically keeps the fidelity with the book, so the literature is really, really ultra-feminist, of course.

Jemima: With Little Women, she obviously was inspired by the text and kind of did it in a contemporary fashion. It was feminist in the start and it really encouraged that narrative and pushed it forward. So yeah.

Maddy: Yeah, I found somehow a way to bring up in almost all of my seminars so far with my girl, that being like, hey, you know, Jo March, she's a lesbian, right? And everyone has, like a little debate about it. I'm just like, guys, she is a lesbian. But, yeah, like a lot of fun to talk about Little Women.

Maddy: I was just looking at my little list of films and I kind of wanted to talk about, um, I think in particular The Personal History of David Copperfield.

Maddy: It came out earlier this year, it's Dev Patel as David Copperfield. 

Jemima: We love the casting.

Maddy: We do. So I found a really interesting website and it's called Mediaversity Reviews.

Maddy: And it gives a kind of like A to F grade for overall diversity for films. And it gives really in-depth reviews of just like, you know, films in terms of like their diversity points.

Maddy: But it does it in a really good way. Like it's not to virtue signal-y. And even, you know, it talks about, you know, like the directors.

Maddy: It's got like a little emoji next to the director. And it shows you whether or not the writer like where they're from is a guy, are they white, you know?

Maddy: Basically, The Personal History of David Copperfield gets a B. So A would be the highest, but it gets a B because they give it five out five for- my Internet connection is unstable.

Maddy: Yeah, The Personal History of David Copperfield gets a B, so the technical diversity, which is kind of talking about overall in terms of just like casting and crew was five out five. But despite passing the Bechdel test, it does point out that a lot of the women kind of like- well, the thing is, it is called The Personal History of David Copperfield.

Maddy: And a lot of the women in the film kind of like exist on the periphery of his life. And, you know, it's all about him and his angst and his stuff he's doing.

Maddy: And it - apart from obviously the fact that it's Agnes, the one who ends up marrying him - which is another thing, she ends up marrying him - she helps to uncover Uriah Heep, who voices Paddington, by the way. She obviously helps to, like, expose the fact that he's swindling her dad and that he's taken over the company and is terrible. So for that, it gets points because it's like, yeah, she's a badass. Like she steals the documents, she does a load of stuff. She's super smart. But apart from that, the film is about a guy and the women tend to exist on the periphery. And, you know, even though, like. Did any of you ever watch Wolfblood?

Sarah: Yeah, I did.

Maddy: Did you recognize Maddie from Wolfblood? She's the one that runs off with Steerforth.

Maddy: Yeah, just a random point. You know, it's Maddie from Wolfblood, but like, you know, just thinking about her, like she kind of like exists on the periphery of the story. And the only time she really comes into play is when she's like either engaged to Ham or she runs off with Steerforth and then he abandons her in London, goes off and dies on the boat. I found him hilarious. I probably shouldn't have done. I just- I just love the way he's always like, "remember me at my best." And I'm like, dude, at best your best is literally someone else's rock bottom. You kind of suck. He's like, "remember me at my best" - you're kind of a dick, though. No one thinks that you're the best.

Maddy: Just stop. But yeah, for race, it gets four out of five and they make a point that obviously Charles Dickens when writing the book, everyone he would have been imagining would have been as white as snow. And that's how he saw the world at the time. But they made a point of just like casting actors they knew would do a good job.

Maddy: And you know, it literally doesn't matter, like it's a story - it is a fictional story and the people are like, oh, but why would so-and-so have so-and-so as a father? That doesn't make sense. It's like, yeah, but, you know, this isn't a film for people who are masters of genetics. This is a film for people that enjoy films and enjoy the story. And all would do a fantastic job.

Maddy: So it gets a really good score for race diversity, but it makes a point, it says, 'when white directors cast blindly without making changes to the character based on the actor's ethnicity, it merely ticks a box of diversity. Meanwhile, matters of true representation not just in body but through diverse narratives defaults to a white experience'. So essentially, I think- I think what they're kind of trying to make is kind of like a point is a bit like the Sexy Lamp test. If you could change the race of this character and it would have absolutely no effect on the plot: is that true representation? I think that's the point they're trying to make. I think what they're trying to say is, yes, this is really good, like I know they had Dev Patel in mind to play David Copperfield from the start, but I think they're making the point that, like, if you're going to cast someone as a character, you need to bring into consideration how their race changes the way that they interact with the world around them and how that might be reflected in the narrative.

Maddy: And it's not interchangeable. And, you know, David Copperfield, looking the way he does, would not have had the same experience as a David Copperfield who was white would have done, especially in Victorian England. But in the end, it's a film. It's a fictional film. 

Sarah: It's a difficult balance to strike, isn't it?

Sarah: You don't want to make it all about race all the time, but you still need to like acknowledge it. It's difficult to represent without overshadowing other elements.

Jemima: If you look at the director, Armando Iannuci- butchered his name. But like, if you look at his authorship, so Death of Stalin, he had Russians from Yorkshire, like his thing is and I listened to an interview when he released Personal History and his justification for all of this stuff is the fact that we can put history, not the kind of the racial side of things, but just history and how things would have been accurately presented, we can put that aside to just have quality in cast and crew.

Jemima: And I think that's a very good point. And of course, this stuff does make a great grounds for the other side. But at the same time, I think he and a lot of people and including what's his name, Dev Patel, all of those people they really, really appreciated and kind of acclaimed, the casting direction, because now so many casting decisions are based on-

Jemima: His essentially groundbreaking thing, because obviously the controversy around having a brown person in a white film as the main protagonist, whatever, and now everyone seems to be doing it. So it kind of has some rubbish sides to it, but at the same time, it's encouraging diversity in a lot of different ways.

Maddy: I remember when the trailer came out for the film, when the comments were just full of the, you know, "Charles Dickens would be rolling in his grave". And it's like, yes, he would, because he was a racist. Everyone back then was racist. But I don't care what he has to say because he's dead.

Maddy: And thanks for the books, Charles, but they're ours now. And then it got zero points for disability.

Maddy: It makes a point. Obviously, it's oh, my God, I'm forgetting everyone's names. Hugh Laurie. Yes. Hugh Laurie playing Mr Dick.

Maddy: He obviously has some issues with his mental health and everyone's really lovely to him about it. I don't - I think they get points for that. But then that's kind of cancelled out by the fact that Mr. Wickfield is serious, he has serious alcohol problems and everyone just kind of think this is a big joke.

Maddy: So for all the points that it gains for being like Mr Dick clearly has something going on there and everyone's super lovely to him about it. And they're never mean to him and they appreciate him for his intelligence and he's great, that gets cancelled out by the fact that Mr. Wickfield is a serious alcoholic and they all kind of make fun of him, but they get zero points for that.

Maddy: I don't know if I would count alcoholism as a disability. 

Jemima: It is a mental illness.

Maddy: Yeah, it's mental illness, I think.

Maddy: But that means that overall it gets a B grade. And I just thought that was an interesting article. I'll probably link it below. It was written by - I'm probably butchering this again, Alicia Johnson, but the Alicia's got a J in it. I think it sounds like it's kind of Polish, so I don't know. And yet it seems like a really interesting website like they give diversity grades to loads of different films, including Lion, another film by Dev Patel, which again, because it doesn't pass the Bechdel test but obviously is very diverse. And yeah, I just- I love The Personal History of David Copperfield, it makes me happy. It's also because obviously, like Bleak House, like the actual Bleak House is in Broadstairs and I'm from Broadstairs.

Maddy: So like, like literally the school next to my school growing up is called Charles Dickens. There are so many pubs in town named after various Charles Dickens things like, when I worked in the pharmacy, so many people would like have prescriptions. It would be like, oh, your address is literally Bleak House. That's so cool.

Maddy: And I don't know, I don't think he was a particularly good person, I've really struggled to read a lot of his work because it's long, it's Victorian. But Charles Dickens obviously is a little bit like- I'm very territorial about it. I'm like, oh, my God, Charles Dickens!

Jemima: Heritage, isn't it?

Maddy: I don't know. I shouldn't be so protective over it, but, you know, I enjoy it. Oh, yeah. How long is the recording so far, Michael?

Michael: I can't actually see a time- if I click on recording will it tell me? 

Maddy: Oh, I thought you were timing it. I thought that would have been- 

Michael: Would have made sense when I started, yeah.

Sarah: I've been timing it on my phone and that's coming up to like forty-eight minutes - I set it off a bit before we, like, started.

Jemima: Yeah. Shall we do a conclusion then, we probably can't fit much more.

Maddy: Yeah.

Sarah: I read some stuff about the Oscars and how like only 50 percent of Oscar Best Picture winners have passed the Bechdel test. Yeah, only half of the Best Picture nominations this year did, might be worth mentioning.

Maddy: I don't want to defend any one, but I will make the point that there have been far less films to choose from this year. Like if- the way we're going the Husavik song Eurovision: Fire Saga or whatever is going to be the one that wins the Best Song for the Oscars.

Maddy: And that would obviously not be ideal, but it's a pandemic! Let Will Ferrell win an Oscar.

Jemima: I just think that, like what makes films Oscar-worthy does not make films good. Yeah, I think that's something that we can all agree on.

Jemima: And so it's just like to win Oscars, you basically have to tick a couple of boxes. Is it melodramatic and sloppy? Yes. Like has it got some really pretentious narrative points? Yes. And then is it either a musical or biographical, all of those things, then it passes. But then that's why a lot of directors and auteurs and stuff just completely reject the whole award system. It's just like the most anti-diverse, anti-feminist, anti-everything. But obviously, as we see in the next couple of years, they have just released that new classification - it won't be implemented for a while, as we know, but I guess they just copied the BAFTAs with a lot of it, doing the whole score marking system of they have to have this amount of diversity in the cast and crew for them to even be allowed to be considered for the award.

Maddy: Cool. Who would like to conclude, I would like not to because I introduced.

Jemima: And so I really hope. Well, we really hope that you have enjoyed this. Obviously, it's a first time, but yeah, I think we've made some really insightful points.

Jemima: And if you would like to look into them further, I'm sure, Michael, God bless his soul, our little white guy at the site-

Jemima: Yes. He'll put some great resources, everything that we were talking about in the description. Yeah. Is there any final thoughts from anyone?

Maddy: I love Dev Patel.

Sarah: Yeah, I second that.  

Jemima: I agree with that wholeheartedly.

Resources:

Failing the “DuVernay Test”: 6 signs your on-screen black character is a tired stereotype

The Bechdel Test, and Other Media Representation Tests, Explained

The Personal History of David Copperfield on Mediaversity Reviews

#podcast #transcript #film criticism #dev patel #personal history of david copperfield #greta gerwig #lady bird #saoirse ronan #peter vanhoeven #xmen #bechdel test #ava duvernay

[thelaurenshippen]

oh hey, here’s a playlist from 2017 that I realized wasn’t on my website with the rest of them and that I totally wasn’t thinking about because there’s actually a part two that has never seen the light of day that may or may not be incoming

notes on my website and also under the cut

As I write, I like to build playlists for all my characters and, occasionally, will make playlists as a character as well. These playlists are part of my writing process and I take them far more seriously than anyone should. Sometimes the playlists come together instantly and effortlessly and sometimes I play around with them for months. As such, there are a fair number of cast-offs that never make it onto the final, official playlist. That's what this playlist is.

So here we are: all the songs that nearly made it on to the character playlists but got cut for various reasons. Those reasons tend to fall into one of a few categories:

There wasn’t space / another song was serving a similar purpose

The song was right for the character but not right for the character at the beginning of their story (which is what most of the playlists are)

The mood/genre/tempo of the song was out of place in the playlist

I discovered the song after the playlists had been put together.

All my playlists are very specifically ordered, so adding or removing songs after their publication is more or less impossible. Instead, I would throw songs into this B-Side playlist as they appeared, meaning that, unlike most of my playlists, the order here is random (aka this playlist has NO flow). Here is a list of where they would have gone had they made the final cut. The characters are listed above the tracks, with a link to the playlist in question.

A/N, 2020: These are the B-Sides specifically from pre-Season 4. Back in August of 2017, I  did a sticker giveaway to see what folks would guess about which songs were for which characters - these annotations were published after that giveaway and thus, there's some reference to how people guessed!

WADSWORTH 

1. “Heavy Metal Lover” - Lady Gaga

This is a Wadsworth song through and through in terms of style and swagger. There just wasn’t space for it.

But would you love me if I ruled the world

DAMIEN 

2. “Reaper Man” - Mother Mother

This is a song that was recommended to me as a Damien song by tumblr user kalgalen and I am actively mad that I didn’t know this song before making Damien’s playlist. The style, the lyrics - everything about this song is Damien. And it actually fits perfectly after the opening track but by the time I was made aware of it, it was too late.

Oh yeah, I’m an ugly mess/not in the face, but in the head - regardless of how attractive Damien is, this is something he thinks. God, what an edgelord line this is.

Oh yeah, I got no choice/got no choice/but to love myself - I mean, it’s just all there.

A/N, 2020: this song eventually made its way onto a playlist -  my playlist for A Neon Darkness, Damien's book.

CHLOE 

3. “Her Morning Elegance” - Oren Lavie

I love that this song really conjures a visceral image to your brain - it paints such a vivid picture. It’s delicate, but determined. I think Chloe sometimes moves through her world separate and observing and that’s what this song is.

There’s also an amazing music video that I think Chloe would watch over and over again.

I got a lot of submissions guessing that this was a song for Sam and I really see that too. It fits well with the aesthetic of her playlist and the theme of fighting for your life everyday definitely resonates with Sam, as does the “Nobody knows” lyric. But the lyrics are also about being out in the world, which is something Sam doesn’t do but Chloe wants to continue to do desperately, despite her ability making it difficult.  

CALEB/ADAM 

4. “Blue and Yellow” - The Used

This was a song suggested by my sister for Caleb and Adam because of the colors involved and also because The Used was a band we both listened to a lot when we were emo teenagers like Adam. Ultimately, this song feels very dated as early emo and didn’t quite fit musically on any of their mixes, either in-universe or not.

And it’s all in how you mix the two/and it starts just where the light exists/it’s a feeling that you cannot miss/and it burns a hole/through everyone that feels it

5. “Stupid for You” - Waterparks

This is another song that was recommended to me, this time by a tumblr user and it is absolutely perfect. I didn’t even realize that there was pop punk being made like this anymore, so I was delighted.

You’re yellow, I’m natural blue/let’s get together and be green like my insides - I mean??? Couldn’t have said it better myself

Also, the refrain of “stupid for you” fits perfectly with the “I’m the guy who’s been so stupid about you that it broke my fucking super power!” I mean, I clearly ghostwrote this song.

ISO: the tumblr user who suggested this song. I have scoured both of my blogs to find the ask to no avail so if it was you, please raise your hand.

Both of these songs would go on a Caleb/Adam ship mix if such a thing existed. But in fact, both their mixes are in-universe and, while one of them might put this on a mix now, it would have been way too vulnerable of a thing to put on one of those earlier playlists. I've linked to their second in-universe mix - the quite lovey one that Adam makes for Caleb.

MARK 

6. “Time Machine" - Robyn

This definitely felt a little too on the nose for Mark, so I went with “Hang With Me” instead. But Mark loves Robyn and would love the DeLorean reference in this so it was very tempting. It’s also a song all about making impulsive decisions, which Mark definitely does a lot, but in classic Robyn style, it’s such a bop despite the serious lyrics. That balance fits Mark perfectly.

7. “F U” - Miley Cyrus

I know this song is about someone cheating, but it is such a good angry-fuck-you song that I can’t help but think of it in the context of Mark’s feelings towards Wadsworth. Having missed the heyday of pop borrowing from dubstep and the increasing use of internet slang, I think Mark would have gotten out of The AM and fallen hard for this song. I imagine many an afternoon before Joan gets home from work just angry dancing around the living room singing along to this.

SAM/MARK 

8. “Someone to Fall Back On” - Jason Robert Brown

This is 100% Sam singing to Mark about being his knight in shining armor. Sam is hard on herself - doesn’t realize her own strength - so the self-deprecating lyrics really work for her. It didn’t make it on the playlist because it felt like it was a little further down the line in their relationship - somewhere around Episode 40.

I’ll take your side/if I’m the only one/I’m used to that/I’ve been alone/I’d rather be/the half of us/the least of you/the best of me

I got a lot of guesses for Frank on this one, which completely fits. He’s quite a bit more confident in his abilities than Sam - if he thinks he can be your knight, he’ll say so right from the get-go.

9. “Can’t Get Started With You” - Ella Fitzgerald

This is pretty self-explanatory. It didn’t fit with the very particular structure that I created for the Sam/Mark playlist and it also felt like a later stage of their relationship. That playlist was them falling in love and wanting to be in the same time; this song is getting close to that but then getting pulled apart again, first by Damien and then by the difficult realties of actually trying to have a relationship. If the previous track is end of Season 3 for them, this is a Season 4 song.

A/N, 2020: it certainly is a Season 4 song, because it actually ended up going on their Season 4 playlist.

DAMIEN/MARK 

10. “Elvis Ain’t Dead” - Scouting for Girls

So…this is a reject from an as of yet published playlist. I know - not fair. Think of this as the free square on a bingo sheet. In the course of writing Season 3, I was motivated to make a playlist for a relationship that was becoming increasingly interesting to write. While this playlist could certainly be seen as a ship playlist, I have no intentions to ever put these characters together in a real way, but their dynamic was so compelling that I wanted to explore it. I will eventually release the playlist because it’s one of the best I’ve made, but I didn’t want it influencing anyone’s reaction to the end of Season 3. Loose lips sink ships.

I wish it was me you chose/Elvis ain’t dead/and you’re coming back

Okay, okay, I won’t leave you hanging because a few people actually guessed this one right - it’s from a Damien/Mark playlist. This is actually one of three unpublished Damien mixes - for whatever reason, music is the fastest and easiest way for me to connect to him. He really brings out the playlist-making skills in me.

A lot of people guessed that this was Agent Green which I absolutely love. Poor Owen.

A/N, 2020: I didn't link to the playlist originally, but it exists now! To this day, I think it's some of my best work.

ROSE 

11. “Carolina” - Harry Styles

This was mostly rejected because I felt stupid having two songs called “Carolina” on one mix and Sara Bareilles trumps Harry Styles (as much as I love him). But in style and content, this really feels like a Rose song.

#playlist #playlists #b-sides #the bright sessions #man elvis ain't dead still really slaps

[monsterdoodles]

Thoughts on Steven Universe Future 3/28/2020

I wanted to write this last night, but there was just so much information to go through.

Spoilers Ahead

Homeworld Bound: I watched the episode when it came out on Cartoon Network’s website. I had planned to go see it in theaters, but that was canceled.

The gems in this episode are very concerned for Steven right now, because he has been missing for days. It must have be a surprise to see him with Jasper walking out of that bathroom. She continues to address him as “My Diamond”.

Steven seems to have run out of people to turn to in this crisis. He feels like he can’t talk to the gems anymore, talking to Connie would dredged up too many feelings, he’s lost his connection with his dad, and now he’s even hurt/killed Jasper. With no more connections, he turns to the Diamonds.

Homeworld is now more colorful than ever. All kinds of gems run around the throne room and there’s even tours of the palace. There is an upcoming election between the two Zircons we met during the trial.

Spinel is on this tour (has she done this before and does she do it all the time? Or is this the first time she’s decided to do this?). There seems to be no ill will towards Steven, and most of what plagued her during the movie seems to be gone (I’m not actually sure how “fine” she is. When Steven asks “What’s wrong with you?” she responds “The usual”. So I would possibly say that not all of her issues are resolved but at least she has the diamonds to support her). After explaining his gem troubles to her, Spinel takes Steven to see the diamonds.

This whole sequence of events felt very fairy-tale-esque. Something about visiting three people to solve a problem, with three very different approaches, except in a fairy-tale the third approach is what usually works.

Yellow can fix any gem and change their form, but the root of Steven’s problem isn’t physical. Blue can make any one happy, but Steven’s problem isn’t exactly emotional either. It’s deeper than surface level emotions, it’s trauma and a lack of a support system. White’s new ability is to let others control her and in a way this amplifies the voice of the voiceless and this can allow gems to talk to themselves. Steven, while controlling White, tries to shatter her, or at least has an intrusive thought about this. This sequence could be interpreted in many ways however, he might have been trying to hurt himself, or White, or Pink, or even all three.

Disturbed by what he did, he leaves. He asks Spinel how she got rid of her “vengeful thoughts” (because that’s how he felt about White, himself, and Pink in that moment). She tells him that she met him and that he told her that she could change. Steven does not want to hear his own advice anymore.

With no more answers or solutions than he started with, Steven leaves homeworld, leaving his sandal behind. Many have pointed out that Steven usually has lost a sandal (in bubbled and bismuth) when he is mistaken for Rose. Here, I’m not sure he’s mistaken for anyone.

So the diamond’s powers are all the opposite of what they used to be. I’m not sure why I didn’t put this together until Tumblr user its-a-gemfact pointed this out, but Pink’s powers were destructive, but she chose to be a healer instead. I think it’s the backwards reveal of all this that had me not thinking about this in its chronological order.

When this episode ended, I was unsure of where he could go. Would he run away all together? Where could he possibly go?

Everything’s Fine: Steven takes the route of denial to try and move on.

Connie calls him and he continues to deflect. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s struggling or that he has hurt anyone. His thoughts about this broadcast on the tv. When he turns it off, he sees his diamond eyes in the reflection for the first time.

So he decides to act like nothing happened. That he is the old Steven and he can just go on with his life without confronting any of this. He looks to the old painting of himself and Garnet in Poolhopping. There he is depicted as an angel. That’s what he want to be. He (unintentionally) yells “I’m fine”, this shatters the glass of his window.

He literally runs away when the gems try to talk him about this. He decides to go to little homeschool again, because it’s the place that he has felt the most needed before.

He crashes Peridot’s horticulture class. Volleyball is there and we don’t get to see whether or not her eye healed. Steven inserts himself into the lesson and offers to perk up some of the plants. Him doing so causes many Plant Stevens to grow and they just run around little homeschool telling people that they are there to help.

It looks like Garnet is some kind of marriage counselor now, so that’s interesting.

Steven then decides to “help” Bismuth at the forge. Blue and Yellow Pearl are there as well as the Crystal Gem Pearl. They are forging “wedding armor”. Is it Yellow Pearl that is getting married or is she merely a model for the armor? When doing the detail work on the armor, Steven splits the anvil in half. He can no longer do delicate things. This is because his stress management is not going well and his body just thinks he is always in danger.

He leaves to find some gems and Onion playing baseball. He joins and catches a ball that almost hits the Heaven and Earth Geodes. For once, one of his plans almost goes right. He lets out a cry of relief and joy, but this destroys the buildings around him. He says he can fix it. He and the plant Stevens begin to move the debris.

When he returns home, the Crystal Gems, Greg and Connie are all there. They confront him about how he’s been acting like he’s okay when he clearly isn’t. He’s even been subconsciously broadcasting a cry for help to Connie’s phone.

Steven has a great monologue here. He talks about the mistakes he’s made these last few episodes, the fight he had with his dad (normal he says), breaking the anvil, the vengeful thoughts towards White, and shattering Jasper. He calls himself a fraud. “How did I keep getting away with this?” He says that he will just continue to make mistakes and fix them forever and ever. He concludes that he is a monster and from within him a monster bursts.

I have felt (and sometimes still feel) like Steven here. As someone with ADHD, my days can just feel like one big series of mistakes.

I Am My Monster: Steven feels like a monster, so he is one now. He doesn’t rampage through the city though. He seems more or less confused and afraid of this new form.

The Crystal Gems, Connie and Greg do not want to hurt him. A plan of attack is never formed. They know that he could potentially damage beach city, so they need to restrain him or return him to his human form.

The B team and the Diamonds (plus Spinel) show up as well. All of these people have had their lives very much effected by Steven in a very positive way. Even the Cluster shows up.

Everyone tries a multitude of ways to restrain and help Steven. Nothing seems to be working and they all try to blame themselves, but as Connie points out, that made the situation about themselves, not Steven. She tells them that they need to show that they are there for him now.

They all give him a tearful hug and tell him all the ways he has helped and now they are there to help him.

“Steven, you must have been so afraid to show us this side of yourself, but we’re not going anywhere. We are all going to take care of you the same way you take care of us. You know what? I don’t have your powers but” and in true fairy-tale fashion, he is transformed by a kiss.

I quoted Connie here, because she said it the most succinctly. This is what Steven needed to hear. This has been a lonely season for him. His family has always been there physically, but him hiding away his problems and feelings distanced them from him emotionally. She didn’t tell him he was or good or that his mistakes are without consequence, she just told him that they would be there for him.

When he becomes human again I think he’s afraid that he has hurt someone. He cries into Lion’s mane. That crying was realistic. I’ve heard people cry like that and I’ve cried like that. It is a great way to end an episode like this.

The Future: Steven has a therapist, finally.

Steven has decided to leave and tour all 39 (apparently) states. He wants to know where to live now.

I’ve seen some have qualms with this. I do too in a way. But in the defense of the show, he does still have his support system back home, he has solid plans to continue to see his friends as well as Connie and there’s always warp pad and Lion to bring him back.

He gives the gems some homemade cookie cats to explain his leaving. They all pretend to take it well. This makes him feel like they don’t care. He goes to the B team and they give him a tearful goodbye. Peridot finally gets to wear an appearance modifier that doesn’t meld to her body.

Jasper, who seems to be living in Little Homeworld now, tries to go with Steven. For a moment, I thought he was going to say yes. She is still addressing him as Diamond, but she does ultimately decide to stay.

Greg helps Steven pack up and Steven gives Greg his room. Steven is leaving like his dad once did and Greg has finally settled back into a home. Steven, however, plans to visit again. The gems and his dad are still his family.

Steven hugs everyone goodbye, for the first time. He and Connie seem to officially be an item after all this time. She plans to meet him at one of his first stops. (Also among his earlier stated plans were college tours with her). He starts to drive away, but he’s still bothered by the fact that the gems did not give him a tearful farewell. He puts the car in reverse and lets them know this. They were afraid of holding him back. Of course they are sad and upset, but they are still his family and this isn’t goodbye forever, it’s just a change.

He finally leaves and it seems that the whole town is out with a farewell banner too. He listens to Being Human as he drives off.

While there is a part of me that wishes some other characters could have gotten more screen time or that some other things could have been wrapped up, the other part knows that this is Steven’s story. Rebecca Sugar has talked about the theory of the sublime before. That when you have a story that goes on without showing it, when the audience takes that story and makes it their own, it becomes sublime. So when the fans inevitably write their fanfiction about Steven’s travels, Jasper’s time at little homeschool, and about the myriad of other character and things they could possibly do, this becomes sublime.

I’m glad I got the watch this show from the very beginning. I’ve met some great people online and irl because of it and it has inspired me and will continue to do so.

#steven universe #steven universe future #steven universe spoilers #steven universe future spoilers #su spoilers #suf spoilers #j posts about stuff